Roadmap for UbuntuServer

[Liam Proven]

I am wondering what plans there are for where Ubuntu Server is going.
At the moment, it seems that the plan is just to create a CD of stable
tested server components, install the base system - comparable to the
Debian base installation - and then leave it up to the system
administrator to work out which components they need, determine what
packages they require for these, install the packages, configure the
software & edit any config files, amend the system startup scripts if
required, and so on.

In other words, it's left up to the user - the admin building the
server - to actually install and configure the machine.

As far as I know, this is exactly what SuSE does with SLES and Red Hat
does with RHEL, so it's in a good tradition. However, it's no use to
anyone who doesn't know what they are doing with Linux and Debian.

Is there any intention to provide a more complete solution, something
comparable to Ubuntu itself, which on installation provides a complete
working graphical desktop with a preselected preinstalled selection of
the best productivity apps and so on?

In other words, something more comparable to established offerings such as:

SME Server  - http://contribs.org/ (free but dated, monolithic and
hard to customise)

or

ClarkConnect - http://www.clarkconnect.com/ (commercial, only a
limited version offered for free)

These pre-install and pre-configure a base set of components (email
server, file server, print server etc.) and provide simple web-based
management interfaces, so that it's possible to get something up and
running without prior Linux experience or knowledge.

I have some ideas and plans about how to build something more capable,
which I have been wanting to do for some time now, and I am an
experienced technical writer able to write good documentation, but
unfortunately I lack the deep Linux skills to customise a
distribution.

--
Liam Proven · http://livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=lproven
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