Comparison of free project management tools

I have played with a few free project management tools and here is a first summary. I am not an expert of PM...

• OpenProj
• Easy to use
• PERT and Gantt diagram
• PERT diagram is a bit difficult to read
• Collabtive
• Quite complex to install
• No PERT diagram
• No Gantt diagram unless you pay
• Good UI
• redmine
• Quite easy to install
• Gantt diagram
• No PERT diagram
• Planner
• Easy to use
• Provides only Gantt diagram
• No PERT diagram
• GanttProject
• Easy to use
• PERT and Gantt diagrams
• Does not provide subtasks

Install redmine on Ubuntu

Installing redmine on Ubuntu is quite straigthforward as you just need to follow this steps. Except that the passenger library must be installed as well. So it is better to start with this command:

sudo apt-get install redmine redmine-mysql libapache2-mod-passenger

Do not configure to follow the step for the database configuration.

How to install Collabtive on Ubuntu

To install collabtive on Ubuntu:

1. sudo apt-get install mysql-server phpmyadmin collabtive

2. I do not care about the security and set the passwords empty.
3. This will install collabtive that will be accessed through http://127.0.0.1/collabtive
4. Try now to access it. If the screen is completely white, it probably means the apache thread is not allowed to read/write collabtive
5. In order to verify it, read /var/log/apache2/error.log If you get such message:

   [Thu Mar 29 02:18:51 2012] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Fatal error:  
   Smarty error: unable to write to $compile_dir '/var/cache/collabtive/templates_c'. 
   Be sure $compile_dir is writable by the web server user. 
   in /usr/share/php/smarty/Smarty.class.php on line 1093
   

   That means you have to provide access:

   sudo chown -R www-data /var/cache/collabtive/templates_c/ 
   

   sudo chown -R www-data /usr/share/collabtive/www 

   sudo chown www-data /etc/collabtive/config.php 

   sudo chmod +w /etc/collabtive/config.php 

6. Create the database:

   sudo mysql

   and create the database you want:

   create database collabtive

7. Now, you should be able to access and configure collabtive http://127.0.0.1/collabtive/install.php