History:

We started working on our own redhat build in 1998 to be branded as ezWorkgroup. In the Fall of 1999, we began to experiment with integrating e-smith into the mix after playing with the e-smith server and gateway 3.0 available at the time. Joe Morrison (original founder and then president of e-smith) gave us the go-ahead to use their 4.0b5 template code via email on March 6 2000. We also talked to Jim McQuillan and got approval to integrate disklessworkstations.com technology into our software. Our first e-smith based distro (ezWorkgroup Server 1.0), based on linux 2.2.16 was first released in May 2000. We continued offering feature updates including new packages for samba (with roaming profiles for xpsp1 clients), chrooted bind 9.2.1, migration to kernel 2.2.19, etc. The most recent package was actually samba-3.0.8 built November 10 2004.

Our next version (ezWorkgroup Server 2.0alpha) used linux 2.4 / e-smith 5.6beta7 and the initial devel iso was released Oct 10 2001. Development ceased shortly thereafter with the most recent package update being Jan 10 2002 as we decided to stick out the old linux 2.2 base. We had abandoned this project during the mitel 6.0/6.5 and contribs.org 6.0.1 era as visitors to the site may have noticed :)

After over 2 years, we are back working on this project and have finished the core for the latest release (and first public distribution). It is a drastic update with a jump to the linux 2.6.9 kernel tree thanks to the rhel/centos 4 base. Other core rpms come from the rpmforge packagers. The latest template system from mitel 7.0alpha3 is used and we also plan to look at code contributions from contribs.org and possibly port in some of our old templates where needed (I doubt we will ever completely re-write the old v1 chroot-bind, disklessworkstation, firewall, etc templates from before as the backend system has changed). If you are interested in helping, please contact one of the developers. While this site is just our company's development scratchpad, we are certainly open to collaboration!