Forum OpenACS Q&A: Anyone thinking of offering OpenACS starter boxes as a business?

This is a repeat of a question in the "other toolkits and
technologies" forum. (One of the limitations of having multiple
forums for OpenACS -- I didn't want to miss anyone out there that
wasn't subscribed to both forums.)

With its free, open source database, OpenACS has a great chance of
being the platform of choice for all kinds of knowledge initiatives,
communities of practice, intranets, etc. Is anyone thinking about
offering starter boxes that have the whole thing installed and
configured (Linux, AOLserver, PostgreSQL, ACS) for the newbies and
non-technical knowledge community activists? (Or is there a way to
create a disk image with the whole thing configured that a newbie
could install?) Since all the software is free, open source stuff,
there should be no license issues to speak of. This ease-of-getting-
started approach I think would greatly accelerate the adoption of
OpenACS. I want to use OpenACS for a plant floor knowledge initiative
and would be very interested in buying such a box and then setting it
up via the admin pages rather than trying to install all the
different pieces and get them to work together. Would any custom PC
integrators be interested in such a thing?

I imagine that something like that would go over well, but you never know. What I think would really do it would be RPMs of AOLserver and OpenACS. PostgreSQL already has a nice set of RPMs, and having the rest of the system ready to go would make it a snap.

I am still working on getting my OpenACS install working, and I've never made an RPM file, so I can't be of any help on this front at this time. I would like to change that, though.

Re: AOLserver RPM
Lamar Owen (creator of PG RPMs) mailed me saying that he plans to RPM AOLserver and the PG Driver, he estimated a couple of weeks before finding the time. Keep an eye out for them...