Sure, offer cacti as source code. That's brilliant. But also as a qcow2 / vmdk image for a noob.
At work, I was asked to create a special VM just for cacti based on debian, for internal monitoring. They don't use qcow2. At home I do. I love that you can compress data. So while at home, I was thinking of compressed data. A vm with RAW img, vs a machine with a compressed format. Then I thought about the best distro I could use to be the tiniest to just run cacti, and nothing else. a cacti only distro. A parenthesis here, I'm thinking of libreelec for people who had experience with that, and astaro, and there's a third i'm forgetting. just enough os to run the task. I love that motto.
But on the other hand, package manager, updates, and on top of it all, i'm a gentoo guy. while at work I mostly have to do debian stuff, then I play on my phone. gentoo@home is twice the pain. But on the other hand, at the end of an endless compilation session, I can just put aside the binaries, the libraries, and other stuff in a squashfs image, data on another partition. package the whole thing as a hdd image that you can just run in any virtualization software. and pick up from there. dont worry about the OS background stuff. just add devices to cacti and watch the stats.
You guys should release cacti as a virtual image as cactiOS. that's my point. I would use it. and just not do the work myself
