TurnKey Drupal 6 Live CD

TurnKey Drupal 6 Live CD is an open source Debian-based operating system designed from the ground up to act as an appliance for deploying dedicated Drupal servers with minimum effort and without paying for expensive products.

Drupal is an open source, web-based and highly modular CMS (Content Management System) software that can help you build corporate brochures, personal blogs, and large community-driven websites. The appliance comes with all of the upstream Drupal configurations.

The Drupal installation has been tweaked to be SEO-friendly and configured to skip sessions and cache database tables for providing users with smaller backups. In addition, several Drupal modules are included, among which we can mention Views, Google_analytics, CCK, ModuleInfo, and Panels.

Furthermore, the Lightbox2, Backup and migrate, Tagadelic, Devel, Admin_menu, Drush, Logintoboggan, CKEditor, Webform, IMCE, ImageCache, CAPTCHA, FiveStar, PathAuto, and GlobalRedirect modules are also included.
 
Among other features, we can mention support for secure connections using the latest SSL implementation, a Postfix MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) for sending emails to users, the phpMyAdmin administration front-end for easy management of MySQL databases, and Webmin modules for configuring Apache, MySQL and PHP.

Another interesting feature is the built-in update status module, which can produce annoying or confusing version notifications when enabled, simply because the Drupal 6 software is installed and updated through the Debian's package manager.
 
When using this appliance to deploy dedicated servers with Drupal 6, users should keep in mind that the installation will fail if the client-side scripting is disabled. Also, the default username for the SSH, MySQL, Webmin and phpMyAdmin components is root.

During the installation, which should not take more than five minutes, users will be able to set new passwords for the aforementioned accounts. A new and updated Drupal 7 Live CD appliance is also available for download on Softoware.

What is new in this release:

• Drupal6:
• Latest version of Drush is now installed via pear at build time.
• Latest versions of modules are now installed via Drush.
• Increased php cli memory limit for drush (LP#1048443).
• Added phpsh (interative shell for PHP) and php5-cli (generically useful).
• Upstream source component versions: ckeditor 4.0.2

What is new in version 11.1-lucid-x86:

• Upgraded all modules.
• Replaced FCKeditor with CKeditor (backend installed in sites/all/libraries).
• Installed Drush, preconfigured /etc/drush/drush.php and Table.php for offline usage.
• Added convenience symlinks: /var/www/{webroot, config}.
• Added TKLBAM overrides.
• Set MySQL root password on firstboot (convenience, security).
• Force MySQL to use Unicode/UTF8.
• Added php-xcache PHP opcode cacher / optimizer (performance).
• Set postfix MTA myhostname to localhost (bugfix).
• Enabled tracking in PHPMyAdmin.
• Set ownership of modules and libraries to root (bugfix).

What is new in version 2009.10-hardy-x86:

• Upgraded to Drupal 6.14
• Upgraded previously included modules to latest stable versions.
• Added extra useful/popular modules:
• devel
• moduleinfo
• advanced help
• backup and migrate
• imce
• panels
• imagecache
• transliteration
• PHPMyAdmin improvements:
• Added pmadb (linked tables) advanced features to PHPMyAdmin (LP#426303).
• Pinned PHPMyAdmin to update directly from Debian (security).
• di-live (installer) MySQL component:
• Added support for complex passwords (LP#416515).
• Added CLI options (user/pass/query/chroot).
• Bugfix: Removed build systems hostname from mysql user table.
• Bugfix: Configure cron script in /etc (survive upgrades).
• Bugfix: Use of dpkg-statoverride (survive upgrades).
• Bugfix: Removed build systems hostname from MySQL user table.
• Regenerates all secrets during installation / firstboot (security).

What is new in version 2009.03-hardy-x86:

• upgraded to Drupal 6.10
• regenerate drupal6 database password during installation (security)
• updated useful/popular drupal6 modules:
• fckeditor
• tagadelic
• webform
• admin_menu
• views
• lightbox2
• logintoboggan
• globalredirect
• cck
• date
• imagefield
• imageapi
• filefield
• getid3
• bugfix: added and configured php-getid3 (dependency of getid3 module)
• major component versions drupal6 6.10-1 mysql-server 5.0.51a-3ubuntu5.4 apache2 2.2.8-1ubuntu0.5 php5 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.5 phpmyadmin 2.11.8.1-5

What is new in version 2009.02-hardy-x86:

• This release includes phpMyAdmin and many popular Drupal5 modules.
• It is rebuilt on top of TurnKey Core, the new common base for all software appliances, which is assembled from Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS packages.
• A bugfix in the daily auto-updates mechanism. Significant usability and security enhancements: confconsole support for systems with multiple NICs, password-free login in demo mode, SSL support, database password setting during installation, no passwords in demo mode, many generically useful Webmin modules, and improved embedded documentation.
• There are many other changes.