Maybe my two cent’s can matter a little?
I like the idea of having a VM appliance, regardless of the OS used to do this. I would, for most, recommend using a headless OS. VM’s have a lot of potential, but they also share their resources. I know you all know this already but figure somebody who may happen across this thread, not knowing this same information, would understand more readily.
That said, because not everybody is as skilled with *nix systems, I agree that a lightweight GUI would be helpful. Maybe having two appliances, a headless and a GUI based appliance would be best? I could, potentially, build a custom appliance for headless using a hand made Linux? (It would be extremely lightweight as I can do LFS and get OS in at around 200 - 500 MiB of use)
@Wayne-Workman Users most definitely know what they’re getting into if they’re going to be doing an Appliance as such, and if not, we have some pretty decent (albeit not the best quite yet) documentation on how to do simple things such as adding a new disk or expanding a volume. 250GB may be a bit high on the disk space side though and I would recommend maybe making it as small is 50GB. I only state this because We can/should not assume the appliance this is being put on WILL have 250GB. In the documentation we should put something informing the users that it is highly recommended to use a larger disk and give related information (Expand/Add storage).
@VincentJ While I see where you’re coming from in that having a netinstall CD would be nice, I think it’s a bit too much to expect. If we’re already so worried about users not knowing what they’re doing, why would we give them more opportunity to make a mistake by having them install the OS itself?
As for the OS to use, whatever works. While I may not be a fan of Ubuntu, Debian is one of my favorites. I may be more comfortable in RH variants, but I am not trying to code the installer to take preference to an OS. If we make an appliance, it should be what the majority will most likely use on their systems if they were to do the install entirely themselves. Because there’s more videos on the net about installing fog that use Ubuntu, I’d actually recommend using Ubuntu. More people are already somewhat familiar with this OS so it would not be any major learning curve, and I have to give credit that Ubuntu is also, in my eyes, one of the easiest linux distro’s to use for those who have NEVER used linux before.