One of the things you may have noticed that appeared in the 3.4.3 release of Openfire is a couple of new installers, and some improvements to existing installers.  Oddly enough, building installers can be one of the more difficult tasks a developer has.  Simply putting out a tarball or zip file is easy, but it's not exactly the most pleasant thing to deal with from an administrator perspective.  In the process of creating installers, you often find yourself fighting with differing standards between OS distributions, or different architectures altogether.  That said, typically once you have created the installer, there's not much to do with it after, so it's generally a one time cost, so to speak, and the benefits far outweigh the time spent!

In an effort to make Openfire as easy to install as possible, we added official Debian and Solaris packages.  Yes, I am aware the Solaris package is listed under Linux right now, but please ignore that for now.    Are we stopping there?  Not really.  I'm not yet sure what other OS's we might be providing packages for at this point.  FreeBSD is about the only other one I've seen a request for and there's a well maintained port (net-im/openfire) of Openfire already.

What we are investigating now is providing hosted repositories for the packages.  Specifically, I'm looking at a Yum and APT repository at the moment.  This would allow system administrators to point their repository configs at our repositories and be able to easily keep up to date.  We are still working out the logistics of this, so stay tuned!

We're also investigating getting Openfire into more distributions.  In other words, instead of having to come to our site to get Openfire, perhaps you could install it from a central Debian repository, or an extras cd, or something of that nature.  There are a couple of possibilities in the works on that front, and a couple more I'd like to pursue.

So hopefully in the near future, it will be as easy as ever to get rolling with Openfire!