Leopard ideas

Meethune and I have been kicking around ideas for breathing new life into Leopard. When I was approached to work on the project the goal was twofold; a chroot’d LAMP environment (complete with installer) and some sort of distributed data search/retrieval layer. The former was easy enough to implement however we were never able to garner the resources to support it as it’s own mini-distro. The communication layer never got out of the planning phase for a host of reasons.

The maturity of projects like Xen and QEMU is rapidly making the chroot approach a thing of the past, however the need for easy rollout of these virtual machines is very great. I know Suse and Red Hat both include their own tools for this task, but they don’t support installing a completely different distro.

Long story short, we are looking at revamping Leopard as a vendor-neutral set of tools for installing, cloning and managing virtual machines. Course we gotta replace that horrid CMS currently running the site with Trac, come up with a real roadmap and perhaps even some code… ;)