As one of those newbies, allow me to chime in and say I think this would be a great idea! I did my install of of Jonathan's rpms also. One quick and easy thing that could be done to make oACS installation more newbie friendly would be to link to Jonathan's page from the software page. I'd been fighting with the install for far too long when I found the rpms and figured "why not? they MIGHT work with Mandrake 8.0." (They do.)
I'd like to suggest that the newbie form of the system requirements should probably say something like "This is the reference platform for openACS. Members in the community also run openACS under (list here). However, we recommend that you start with the reference platform, as it is most likely to work out-of-the-box."
