Re: [cobalt-users] open raq distro

[Greg Boehnlein <damin@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, William J.A. Brillinger wrote:

> Isn't this what Qbalt is?
> 
> It will be a debain based RaQ Implementation.
> 
> (I know - it still looks like vapor ware - sorry Ryan! no offence, I'm 
> waiting patiently)

In my opinion, the community should probably organize around a couple of 
different projects:

1. Updating/Extending the Cobalt "BIOS" for the Raq and Qubes. There have 
to be some emebdded sadist out there that would love to do this! ;)

2. Continue to patch/extend/fix the Cobalt Code base, instead of scrapping 
it. A community of people (NuOnce, RaqShack etc..) that have a lot of 
experience and time invested in this would be great candidates to assist 
in the project.

3. OS Restore CD updates / releases. There is a great need to release OS 
Restore CD's w/ the all of the latest and greatest patches on them, and if 
the community continues to develop, patch, fix and update on the existing 
Cobalt codebase, this would be a worthwhile project. We could also throw 
in modifications to the Restore CD to allow us to restore the Cobalt 
Distribution to -NON- Cobalt hardware. I did a bunch of work on this a 
while back and was marginally successful at it, but it was pretty ugly and 
I have no idea if my code is anywhere accessible at this point. In any 
case, the OS Restore CD's CAN be hacked to allow you to do all sorts of 
nifty things! ;)

4. The Cobalt UI (Aka OpenQuote / OpenRaq550) running on top of a RedHat 
or Fedora distribution. Let's face it.. the Cobalt administration 
interface, while it has its flaws, is by far the easiest of the "Control 
Panels" out there for our client's to use. Re-training them to PLESK is 
not an idea.. but hey.. if I could put the Cobalt UI on a 4 way Xeon Box 
w/ 2 gigs of memory and a ton of storage I'd consolidate all of the Cobalt 
RAQ units in my datacenter onto a single box! :)

5. A completely NEW distribution (Qbalt etc..) is probably my least 
favorite idea, but there are many flaws in Cobalt's distribution that 
could be fixed. It would be great if you could take the best of Debian and 
the ease of the Cobalt UI and merge them into a single unified 
distribution, but since Cobalt's stuff was originally based on RedHat I 
think you would have much better luck with Fedora.

Just some thoughts for discussion. If anyone is interested, I have Raq550 
User Mode Linux image that I made some time ago. I'd have to clean it up, 
and it is a BIG BIG sucker, but hey..

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