Naive question I know but from my quick search on Wiki; what's the purpose of it having it's own forum, it seems just like another distro?

The Cobalt Raq was a server appliance that had it's own control panel. They were very popular some time back.

Because they were the thing a half a decade ago or so. :stickout:

As mentioned, it was its own distro for its own hardware produced by Cobalt Networks, then bought by Sun. Sun then took it out back like the red-headed stepchild it was and shot it dead.

Cobalts are pretty much plug in and go. If you install "bluequartz" (CentOS based), you'll see pretty much what it was all about.

I have a Cobalt on my network and its really handy for testing stuff. They are low powered by todays standards but they are easy to get started on.

Yea, Cobalt was good during 1999-2001. After that it pretty much died after Sun bought them. I was running our hosting business off of Coblat. We had almost 7 RAQ servers. Brings back memories :)

Alot of dedicated hosts were mostly selling Cobalt RAQs also. Boy how times change.

People like the Raq because the hardware was simple and fairly robust. You can pick them up on eBay for $50-$100, which is not bad for something that will run a dozen websites pretty easily.

The hardware is massively out-of-date now, but you can still run pretty modern Linux-based software on them. While you still see some commercial hosting on them, the talk here is mostly hobbyist/home servers.

what's the purpose of it having it's own forum, it seems just like another distro?

Cobalt's were the first successfully "webhosting" server that allowed everyone to easily setup "Virtual hosts" with a GUI... There a "all in one" solution as opposed to a gui that works with "a OS". It was often refereed to an appliance...

As I recall, Long ago in the now closed Cobalt Users List, Webhosting talk became the place to discuss things that didn't need to be on the mailing list.

I'm guessing with so many Cobalt users coming over they made a forum just for Cobalt users since the operating system used by the RaQ products was updated and controlled by Cobalt and thereby didn't' really fit in the dedicated forum directory where the GUI was a add-on for the OS.