Endian is the next product I tried. There's a commercial edition and a community edition. Biggest difference I noticed was that hotspot support is a commercial product. No big deal. I can live without a captive portal feature.
I decided to try Endian out in a VM and the setup was quick and performance was fantastic. It's based on Smoothwall.
I created a USB installer using unetbootin and I was looking forward to a painless install based on my VM experience.
It was not to be. For whatever reason I kept getting an blue screen and when I switched to the console the error was: "Fatal: module usbhid not found." I googled, dug through the forums with no luck. I ended up trying a PXE boot of the ISO using syslinix. Same error. Make sure you use the latest version of syslinux which contains memdisk that supports ISO PXE boot. I found this post to be very useful:
Setting up a server for PXE Network booting
My next choice is ClearOS. I'll write about that later.
