Hi Robert,
The purpose is to allow anyone possibly interested on openacs & .LRN to actually try it at the application level (functionalities), but also at the technical level through ssh access, so you can hack it, stuff like that. Also, we would like to see it as another possible entry to the OpenACS world, where we focus more on the people who might be interested on it.
Next steps is to provide custom installations (.LRN, plain oacs, project-manager, etc.).
