My understanding of the "virtual appliance" concept would be something like a regular application stripped down to the essential elements and packaged as a virtual machine. So, for instance, you could take ProTools or Cakewalk (music software), add a bunch of special purpose tools like LilyPond (open source music notation software), remove anything not useful like browsers/email/office/etc. Then you put the result in a virtual machine.
My view would be that it mimics the VCR... a standalone special purpose device. Packaging it all in a virtual machine means that you don't have to worry about corrupting your local machine or ending up in DLL hell. Adding a virtual machine is a copy operation on the disk-image file. Removing one is the same thing. It's quite useful. I have a half dozen VMs that I regularly use for Axiom testing and they are all quite incompatible. So Doyen would be a virtual machine focused on adding and integrating scientific software into a single purpose platform. A hyper-packaging concept. Instead of installing a dozen tools to get a local axiom wiki working you just copy the VM image. t _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer