The Porter Method » vm http://www.theportermethod.com/blog A look into the thoughts and opinions from the mind of Doug Porter. Tue, 15 Nov 2011 05:08:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.4 TurnKey Linux Software Appliances http://www.theportermethod.com/blog/2009/09/21/turnkey-linux-software-appliances/ http://www.theportermethod.com/blog/2009/09/21/turnkey-linux-software-appliances/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:58:40 +0000 Doug Porter http://www.theportermethod.com/blog/?p=261 Continue reading →]]> When testing out new software packages or development environments, part of the hassle tends to be downloading the package, finding a spare machine, installing it on that machine, and then getting it configured and ready to go. A great site called TurnKey Linux has come up with a solution that perfectly solves these problems.

They provide based software appliances that are pre-configured and installed with various software packages. The appliances are created with a small footprint and are packages as Live CD’s (bootable ISO’s) that can be run via CD-Rom or loaded into any of the virtual machine environments.

They have appliances for many of the most popular open-source software packages including:

Google App Engine
Tomcat
phpBB
WordPress
LAMP
Ruby on Rails
MediaWiki
Django
and many more

At work we wanted to set up a Wiki to track our development documentation. Using the MediaWiki appliance we had a complete running VM of MediaWiki within 6 minutes of downloading it. If you are interested in experimenting with any of these software packages, you must check TurnKey Linux out.

]]> http://www.theportermethod.com/blog/2009/09/21/turnkey-linux-software-appliances/feed/ 1 EasyVMX Empowers the VMWare Player http://www.theportermethod.com/blog/2009/09/14/easyvmx-empowers-the-vmware-player/ http://www.theportermethod.com/blog/2009/09/14/easyvmx-empowers-the-vmware-player/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:57:35 +0000 Doug Porter http://www.theportermethod.com/blog/?p=258 Continue reading →]]> At work we use the VMWare product suite extensively. We have the luxury of having licenses to almost all of their products. At home though I do not have personal licenses to many of these products but still want to be able to take advantage of the power of virtualization for experimentation in a development environment.

VMWare offers for free their VMWare player product which allows you to run existing VM’s. This product, though, does not allow you to create new VM’s, just run existing ones. Enter a great site called EasyVMX.com. This site allows you to create a blank shell VM into which you can load OS’s or software.

In its most basic form, a VM is just a .VMX text file that contains a description of the system specs of the VM. Using EasyVMX you can define the system specs you want to use (typically linking the CD-Rom drive to an ISO file to use for installation), download the .VMX file and start it up using the VMWare Player.

A great site when working with VM’s that I will write about more next week is www.turnkeylinux.org/. They have preinstalled ISO’s of many application platforms.

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