[dev] virtual machine bounty

[Colin Andrews]

I've been playing around with VMWare player a bit lately and I just noticed the
bounty for creating a complete horde installation on a virtual machine. This
sounds fun and sounds like something I might be able pull off.

So I am sending to this list to ask if anybody has already started on this and
if not to collect feadback.

I don't think I even need a full VMWare suite to do this. I can just grab one of
the free virtual machine images from the VMWare player site and install the
necessary components.

Here's what I'm leaning towards:

* Start with the Debian Sarge minimal image - it's one of the smallest of the
server grade linux os images on vmware player site, it's what I'm most familiar
with, and the Debian organization is painfully particular about stability.

* Apache 2 (2.0.54) traditional threading model (most stable). mod-php4
(4.3.10). Anything else? mod-python? mod-perl? This is supposed to be minimal
right?

The original bounty description suggests that the image should be setup as a
full mail server. I don't know if this makes sense to me. I think most people
who would find this image useful would rather just point the horde install at
another existing imap or pop3 server and not deal with all the DNS/MTA
configuration to make a virtual machine usable for internet mail. There
probably are *some* users who *would* want that, but I bet they would be
capable of setting up the VM themselves. Perhaps 2 images, one with full mail
processing capability and one without.

* SQL - I lean towards MySQL because that's what I'm most familiar with.
Postgress is also an option. Any opinions? I'd probably also put phpmyadmin on
it because I find it so useful so often.

Probably it would also be nice to setup a default start page that had some
useful docs and pointed new users to the admin pages and what they need to do
to finish the config.

Your feedback will be greatly appreciated.
Colin Andrews