Limited Availability of Open Source Conference Management Packages

I was recently tasked with providing a solution for managing internal sales conferences.  The operative phrase here being Open Source.  After a bit of a hunt I only came across two, ConfTool and Pentabarf.  Pentabarf looked like the better solution, though I would have preferred a better product name.  Pentabarf is based on Ruby On Rails and PostgreSQL, neither of which is on my companies Approved technologies, so there will be a bit of a sell there.

The geek factor of Pentabarf is rather high as well.  The Pentabarf wiki infomation assumes a fairly high level of knowledge and has several dependencies.  If you eat and drink sudo and apt-get, you'll probably do ok. 

In my case, I decided to install it on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex under VMWare 5.  At first I was going to use openSUSE,  but after some initial installation issues, I switched over to Ubuntu.  There was still some significant headscratching that consumed most of the weekend. 

I did find one very helpful installation guide from someone that had run into some of the same problems.  I was still having some problems with the virtual host hooking into Rails with the fast cgi method that was provided, but when I installed Phusion Passenger, it all snapped together.