TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library

TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library
OS family Unix-like
Working state Current
Source model Open source
Update method APT
Package manager dpkg
Platforms IA-32, X86-64
Kernel type Monolithic (Linux)
License Free software licenses
Official website www.turnkeylinux.org

The Turnkey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is a free open source project which has developed a range of Debian based pre-packaged server software appliances (aka virtual appliances). Turnkey appliances can be deployed as a virtual machine (a range of hypervisors are supported), in cloud computing infrastructures (including AWS and others) or installed in physical computers.

Features

The project currently maintains around 100 virtual appliances, all freely licensed and each a ready-to-use solution optimized for ease of use, with daily automatic security updates and full backup capabilities built in. Each appliance is designed to "just work" with little configuration required.[1]

They are packaged in several formats, optimized for several different virtualization platforms, in addition to two separate builds for installing onto physical media (to non-virtualized hard disk or USB from a hybrid ISO) or onto the Amazon EC2 cloud.[2]

Pre-integrated server applications include LAMP, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Redmine, MySQL, MediaWiki, Domain controller, File server, Ruby on Rails, phpBB, and many others.

History

Founded by engineers of an Israeli startup,[7] the project was conceived in mid-2008 as a community-oriented open source project that would focus on helping users piece together turnkey solutions from open source components in the largest Linux distributions. According to one of TurnKey Linux's co-founders, the project was in part inspired by a desire to provide open source alternatives to proprietary virtual appliance vendors that would be aligned with user interests and could engage the community.[8]

The project launched in September 2008 with three prototype appliances for Drupal, Joomla and LAMP, based on the Ubuntu 8.04.1 build.[9] In the following months usability was improved and a dozen additional appliances were released including Ruby on Rails, MediaWiki and Django.[10]

In October 2009, the project released 40 appliances based on Ubuntu 8.04.3 including 25 new additions to the virtual appliance library. The release included support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and a new Virtual machine image format with OVF support.

TurnKey Linux was listed as a winner of the 2009 "Bossies" by InfoWorld as one of the "Top 40 open source products" of that year.[11][12]

Turnkey Linux was nominated for the SourceForge February 2012 Project of the Month.[13]

In August 2012, version 12.0 was released with the library increased to include over 100 appliances. This release also marked a move away from Ubuntu as the underlying Operating System to Debian 6.0 (aka Squeeze). This move was cited as being for various reasons, particularly security.[14]

Early June 2013 saw a significant change of tack with the version 12.1 update release; built with the new "TKLDev" open build infrastructure. This release also included the first X86-64 builds.[15] Later that same month, the Turnkey Linux custom application code was moved to GitHub which also included a tracker for appliances bug reports.[16] As promised, in mid July Turnkey Linux released their image building appliance (TKLDev) as well as an additional separate GitHub account to house all the appliance specific code (used by TKLDev to build the appliances).[17]

November 2013 saw the release of v13.0, based on Debian 7.2 (aka Wheezy).[18]

September 2015 saw the long overdue release of v14.0, based on Debian 8.2 (aka Jessie),[19] followed by an April 2016 maintenance release, v. 14.1, based on Debian 8.4.[20]

Design

TurnKey's virtual appliances start life as a "stripped down" Debian bootstrap (versions previous to v12.0 based on Ubuntu.[10]) To this is added the TurnKey Core, which includes all the common features for the project's virtual appliances,[21] including:

The TurnKey Core has a footprint of approximately 110 MB, and is available as a separate download. Application software is installed on top of the Core, which typically increases the size of a virtual appliance up to approximately 160 MB.[23] By downloading and installing the appliance package to the hard drive, it is intended by the developers that administrators would gain an easy method of setting up a dedicated server.[10]

New software appliances, or customised appliances can be developed by forking the appropriate appliance build code on GitHub[24] and then built using TKLDev.[25] Additionally appliances can also be customized and extended using TKLPatch,[26] a simple appliance modification mechanism.

TurnKey Linux can be run as a virtual machine with VirtualBox and VMWare, although the former has been described as having been provided with more documentation.[27]

Screenshots

See also

References

  1. ↑ "TurnKey GNU/Linux: 100+ Free Ready-to-Use System Images for Virtual Machines, the Cloud, and Bare Metal". TurnKey Linux. Retrieved July 20, 2014.
  2. ↑ "Supported virtualization platforms and build types". TurnKey GNU/Linux docs. Retrieved 2014-07-20.
  3. ↑ "Using default VM build with KVM". TurnKey GNU/Linux docs. Retrieved 2014-07-20.
  4. ↑ "Appliance downloads are back (Proxmox VE 2.0rc1) including TurnKey Linux library". Martin Maurer - Proxmox VE project lead via ProxmoxVE announcement thread. 23 February 2012. Retrieved 15 April 2012.
  5. ↑ "Introducing TurnKey Linux Appliance Library". OpenNode Cld Platform. 18 October 2013. Retrieved 8 February 2014.
  6. ↑ "Installing TurnKey from USB flash drive". Alon Swartz. 8 January 2014. Retrieved 8 February 2014.
  7. ↑ Scannell, Ed (March 10, 2009). "TurnKey Linux Delivers Open Source Appliances". InformationWeek. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  8. ↑ Panettieri, Joe (March 12, 2009). "12 Ubuntu Server Appliances Meet the Cloud". WorksWithU. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  9. ↑ "TurnKey Linux: new project builds Ubuntu based Live CD appliances". Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter (108). 2008. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  10. 1 2 3 Fransen, Matto (February 25, 2009). "Kant-en-klare open source bedrijfsapplicaties". Infoworld. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  11. ↑ Dineley, Doug; Borck, James R.; Mobley, High (August 31, 2009). "Best of Open Source Software Awards 2009". InfoWorld. Retrieved 24 February 2010.
  12. ↑ 2009 BOSSie for Open Source Platforms and Middleware, see Slide 7
  13. ↑ "SourceForge.net: VOTE for the February Project Of The Month". SourceForge.net. 10 January 2012. Retrieved 15 April 2012.
  14. ↑ "Announcing TurnKey Linux 12.0: 100+ ready-to-use solutions". Liraz Siri. 30 August 2012. Retrieved 13 November 2012.
  15. ↑ "TurnKey Linux offers 64-bit server apps on Amazon cloud". Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. 11 June 2013. Retrieved 16 February 2014.
  16. ↑ "TurnKey moves to GitHub". Alon Swartz. 28 June 2013. Retrieved 8 February 2014.
  17. ↑ "Introducing TKLDev - Turnkey's appliance development and build system in a box". Alon Swartz. 18 July 2013. Retrieved 8 February 2014.
  18. ↑ "TurnKey 13 out, TKLBAM 1.4 now backup/restores any Linux system". Liraz Siri. 21 November 2013. Retrieved 8 July 2014.
  19. ↑ "v14.0 stable release - Massive Community Effort!". Jeremy Davis. 17 September 2015. Retrieved 24 November 2014.
  20. ↑ "v14.1 Release - Bugfixes, Maintenance and More". Jeremy Davis. 15 April 2016. Retrieved 25 April 2016.
  21. ↑ "TurnKey Linux Core - Common Base Appliance". TurnKey Linux. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  22. ↑ TKLBAM - Smart automated backup and restore
  23. ↑ "Open source server appliances ship". LinuxDevices.com. March 9, 2009. Archived from the original on 27 January 2013. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  24. ↑ Turnkey Linux Appliance Build code repository
  25. ↑ TKLDev - Appliance Build Engine
  26. ↑ TKLPatch - a simple appliance customization mechanism
  27. ↑ Proffitt, Brian (February 15, 2010). "Virtual Appliances Offer Fast Sandboxes, Production Environments". ITWorld. Retrieved 24 February 2010.
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