TurnKey MediaWiki Live CD

TurnKey MediaWiki Live CD is an open source distribution of Linux based on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system and designed from the ground up to provide users with a simple, straightforward and easy-to-use software appliance for deploying dedicated MediaWiki servers with minimum effort.

MediaWiki is an open source and powerful Wiki engine, originally engineered to serve the needs of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The appliance comes with all of the upstream MediaWiki configurations, tweaked to use Tidy for compliant and clean HTML code, as well as support for image uploading and resizing.

In addition, it includes several MediaWiki extensions, among which we can mention mediawiki-extensions-base, mediawiki-extensions-collection, mediawiki-extensions-confirmedit, mediawiki-extensions-geshi, and mediawiki-extensions-openid.

Support for secure connections using the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) technology, a Postfix mail server for sending emails to users, and Webmin modules for configuring PHP, Apache and MySQL are also included.

Furthermore, the mwlsext script will make sure that the available/enabled extensions are displayed correctly. While the default username for the SSH, phpMyAdmin, MySQL and Webmin components is root, the default MediaWiki username is admin.

The appliance is distributed as Live CD ISO images, specifically engineered to be compatible wih the 64-bit (amd64) and 32-bit (i386) instruction set architectures. In addition to the Live CDs, this TurnKey edition is available for download as VM (Virual Machine) images for the OpenNode, OVF, OpenVZ, OpenStack and Xen virtualization technologies.

For users' convenience, the appliance features a website logo, which is stored in /var/lib/mediawiki/images/logo.png, as well as administrative emails and website name set in /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php.

The text-mode installation provided via the Live CD ISO images takes only a few minutes and requires users to partition the disk drive and choose where to install the boot loader. After the installation, users will be able to enter new passwords for the system administror account, the MySQL 'root' account, and the MediaWiki 'admin' account.

What is new in this release:

• Upgraded to the latest upstream source version (1.31.0)
• Updated install procedure (conf.d/main) to leverage MediaWiki install.php [ Vlad Kuzmenko ]
• Install Adminer directly from stretch/main repo
• Provide "adminer" root-like user for Adminer MySQL access
• Replace MySQL with MariaDB (drop-in MySQL replacement)
• Updated version of mysqltuner script
• Includes PHP7.0 (installed from Debian repos)
• Updated PHP default settings
• Remove phpsh (no longer maintained)
• Note: Please refer to turnkey-core's changelog for changes common to all appliances. Here we only describe changes specific to this appliance.

What is new in version 13.0:

• MediaWiki:
• Latest Debian Wheezy package version of MediaWiki.
• Removed fckeditor extension, no longer available in Debian [#73].
• PHPMyAdmin:
• Configured to allow users preferences stored in database.
• Specified blowfish_secret and regeneration on firstboot (security).

What is new in version 11.3-lucid-x86:

• Installed security updates.
• Enabled etckeeper garbage collection by default.
• Upgraded to latest inithooks version (adhoc re-initialization via turnkey-init)
• VMWare build: run vmware-config-tools.pl on first boot
• Amazon EC2 EBS build: support resizing of root filesystem

What is new in version 11.1-lucid-x86:

• Patched FCKeditor to be php5.3 compliant.
• Updated ConfirmEdit to be php5.3 compliant.
• Added convenience symlinks (/var/www/{webroot, config, extensions}).
• Set MediaWiki admin password on firstboot (convenience, security).
• 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.

What is new in version 2009.10-hardy-x86:

• Upgraded to MediaWiki 1.15.1
• Upgraded extensions to be compatible with 1.15
• Added AWC forum extension.
• Reverted FHS compliance patch (extension directory location).
• Not yet accepted upstream.
• Prioritizing ability to upgrade directly from upstream.
• 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).
• Bugfixes:
• Increase PHP memory limit to 32M to match Apache PHP limit (#LP:360606).
• Removed Wikipedia namespace declarations from preloader extension.
• Removed build systems hostname from MySQL user table.
• Regenerates all secrets during installation / firstboot (security).

What is new in version 2009.04-hardy-x86:

• upgraded fckeditor extension (fixes LP#358294 - corrupted links)

What is new in version 2009.03-hardy-x86:

• upgraded mediawiki to version 1.14
• upgraded extensions to be compatible with 1.14
• patched FCKeditor to fix issues with 1.14
• removed Universal Edit Button (integrated into 1.14 core)
• moved extensions to /usr/local/share (better compliance with FHS)
• fixed phpmyadmin error: cannot load mcrypt extension (LP#345275)
• improved MediaWiki passwords/secrets (security)
• wiki database password is now randomly generated, and regenerated during installation
• better random secret regeneration during installation
• major component versions
• mediawiki 1:1.14.0-1
• 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:

• Popular extensions for MediaWiki.
• Postfix MTA (bound to localhost) to enable password recovery.
• 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.