I was working on the AstRaq (yes, that's what I'm calling it) last night and I'm struggling with my limited knowledge of the guts of Linux. For a long time I've used TrixBox and it's worked fine for me. I've been considering switching to AsteriskNow though, partly because it'll serve my needs just as well and partly because it's put out by Digium.
The problem I'm running into is that I need to compile a new kernel for the RAQ support. I've compiled kernels before, although it's been quite a while. It's just that it's way outside my comfort zone. So, I started looking into getting source and the process of compiling a kernel and what I think I've found is that you want to be consistent with the distro you're using. In other words, it's possible to just do a straight kernel upgrade but it's better to use the tools provided with the distro. If someone can tell me that I'm crazy and overthinking this I'd appreciate it.
More digging and I discover that AsteriskNow is built off of rPath. Again, lack of familiarity. I've been seeing rPath in a lot of appliance style distro's lately and I get the impression it has some really nice tools for building that kind of package. I found that the package management for rPath is Conary and that there are some ways to build a custom kernel for an appliance. I imagine this works for the appliance after it's been installed but that's not clear to me. Also, this tutorial I found makes reference to things I imagine rPath developers implicitly understand such as "cooking" in the changes. More research I'll have to do.
But this has left me wondering...do I take the time to understand rPath and it's oddities? Or do I do a basic Debian/Ubuntu install and load Asterisk from apt-get? That won't get me the gui tools but I probably don't need them. Might be nice for someone else though. And then, will I ever be able to run the updating tools in AsteriskNow if I'm running a custom kernel? Do I need to worry about AsteriskNow wiping out my customer kernel?
So many questions and not enough time for answers. If anyone has some insight I'd sure be happy to hear it.