That's the point, I am not asking technical questions. I want you to tell me, in as layman-ish terms as possible, what you want to achieve. Nothing to do with specific products and their capabilities, no fancy marketing gimmick words, just plain and simple, describe what you have now, and where do you want to be.

I've done enough consulting gigs in my time to absolutely despise marketing hype and meaningless words like "cloud". In many cases, figuring out what the customer actually wants is much harder than delivering a solution, especially when complex systems and multiple various solutions are involved. This is why, what I always do, is ask to be told what needs to be happening, without getting into technicalities, in non technical terms if possible. Usually it turns out that the initial "I want, uh, cloud" becomes something much simpler, cheaper, and with better functionality, than what the customer thought it would be.

I'd hate letting this die unanswered...
I use Slackware as my main distribution since 7 came out so I know how lovely it is, and I managed to convince dyasny that its superior on a number of subjects last time he visited...
I also make my living from OpenStack and I would call myself an advanced user.

OP: If you would go here: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/devstack/ there is a stack.sh script that pretty much sums things up: It gathers which distro it is running on, and then trying to resolve the dependencies with dnf/yum/apt.
OpenStack is mostly (but not only) python based code so if you could go over the script and check what the script is trying to fetch and install, you can do the same. pip has its own dependency resolution so once you clear the non python preconditions, the core OpenStack components should be a matter of pip install, and the OpenStack components offer a requirment file like this one: https://github.com/openstack/heat/bl...quirements.txt
Do note the hardware requirements for Devstack, which is a VERY limited flavor of OpenStack meant for developers playing around. Real environments are terabytes of RAM...

you wish

I see this as the "real" question here. OpenStack is open source; its developers have built it to easily install on a set of distributions. If you want more, you are free to modify its install process and make it work elsewhere; that's the strength of Open Source. It feels like a liability because you have to do extra work, but it's better than other solutions that won't let you modify their software.

As for your own private cloud, I think you should sit down and think about what features you want. Do you just want a distributed file system? maybe something like Gluster or NFS is what you want. Do you want a bunch of software that runs in an http browser? maybe OwnCloud is what you are looking for. You may be able to build a "cloud" like environment without actually signing up to be a part of what the market is calling The Cloud. Or maybe you do want OpenStack, after all; in that case, read the source for the installer, replicate what it does in a reproducible script of your own, and install. Once it's all installed and confirmed, publish your script so others can use it!

Ok, it took me a while to think this through, but I believe I have a reasonable base package. Initially the family will need a wiki, video chat server with a conference mode, blogs, photo galleries, genealogy charts and a recipe manager. Secure replacements for Facebook and Twitter, as well as a mailing list manager would also be helpful. Some of these may need to be duplicated so various branches can maintain focus and some of the content may need to be migrated from various commercial services. Over the extended families I can see 300-600 individuals that would be accessing it regularly. (For example, in just my immediate family, my mother, at 91, had 9 children who have given her 31 grandchildren and 42 great-grandchildren so far. Some of those G-GC are now in college. Neither of her brothers had any children, but of her five sisters, two of the oldest had more children than she did. That's probably why they only lived into their 80's.)

I would like to set up a VPN for secure access using keys distributed at reunions on thumb drives and/or SD cards. Limited access could also be provided using passwords with IDs which would have to be validated before they can be used. The physical hardware and all access to it is to be controlled exclusively by family members. I have several nieces and nephews that could handle this, if I can pry them out of their proprietary mindset.