news

TurnKey 11.3 maintenance release - next stop Ubuntu 12.04!

Liraz Siri — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 07:34:59 +0000

Ho ho ho, happy holidays everyone! I know most of you are already shifting into holiday mode, so I'll keep it short and sweet.

We've just pushed out TurnKey 11.3 - the final maintenance release based on Ubuntu 10.04. The next release will be based on Ubuntu 12.04. We're already shifting into high gear for that. There will be surprises. Hopefully good ones!

Anyhow the new images we just pushed out from our CloudTask automation swarm include fixes for various bruises and scrapes, as well as the very latest security updates.

If you've already installed a previous version of TurnKey 11, you don't need to download anything because by default TurnKey is configured to automatically install all of the security updates over the network.

The maintenance release will mainly be of interest to new users and existing users doing new deployments. Especially those of you who are super impatient like mua and don't care to wait long minutes after deployment for the system to pull over a ton of security updates. This cuts down the time it takes to fully deploy Core in the cloud from 5 minutes to just 30 seconds.

New Hub feature: Cloud server monitoring

Alon Swartz — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 02:15:11 +0000

Ladies and gentle geeks, I'm proud to announce we've just pushed out 100% free basic server monitoring to all TurnKey Hub accounts. This should make it easier to keep tabs on the health and performance of your cloud servers. Existing Hub users don't need to do anything to enjoy this new feature. It just works.

A better server dashboard

As you can see in the screenshot below, the server dashboard now includes thumbnail graphs of CPU utilization, disk IO and network traffic for the last hour:

Give me more!

Alright, so instead of the last hour, you want data on how your server was doing last night? Or last week? No problem. CloudWatch samples performance at 5 minute intervals, and stores up to two weeks worth of data.

Clicking on the thumbnail graph pops up a larger interactive graph that lets you zoom in and out, sample performance metrics ondifferent timescales (e.g., hourly, daily, weekly, etc.) and move back and forward in time:

No installation, monitoring agents required

You don't need to install or configure any monitoring agents, because the Hub pulls statistics directly from Amazon's CloudWatch API. CloudWatch in turn gets its data directly from the virtualized hardware layer running underneath your server's operating system.

The Hub now supports reserved instances - pay up to 50% less

Liraz Siri — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:05:02 +0000

In response to user demand on the forum we've added Hub support for Amazon EC2 reserved instances.

Reserved instances are an Amazon EC2 feature that allows you to reserve server capacity up to 3 years in advance by paying a low one-time fee.

In exchange the hourly usage rate is significantly reduced and server capacity is guaranteed to be available when you need it.

How much will I save?

For servers that are deployed full-time you can save up to 50% of costs. For example, running a small server continuously:

Cost	Unreserved	Reserved (1 year)	Reserved (3 years)
Up front	$0	$227	$350
Hourly rate	$0.085	$0.03	$0.03
Monthly cost	$61	$21	$21
1 year	$734 ($61 x 12)	$486 ($227 + $21 x 12)	$375 ($375/3 + $21 x 12)
3 years	$2,203	$1,460 ($486 x 3)	$1,127 ($375 + $21 x 12 x 3)
Total savings	$0	$247/year (35%)	$1,075/3 years (50%)

Similar relative cost savings are available for all server sizes.

Does reserving capacity obligate me to run a server full time?

No. At any time you can further reduce costs by shutting down unused capacity. Servers reserved for 3 years break even at 24% usage.

Which server types can I reserve?

Only EBS-backed TurnKey servers. S3-backed TurnKey servers cannot be reserved.

How exactly does it work?

Through the Hub you reserve a server instance of a specific size in a specific region. Amazon bills you a non-refundable one-time fee. The Hub applies the discounted hourly rate immediately to any matching server. You'll see this reflected in the server dashboard.

If you don't have a running server, the discounted rate will be applied to the next server you launch in the reserved size and region.

Are the reduced usage fees attached to a specific server?

You don't have to worry about that. Reserved instances are a property of the billing system, not your cloud servers. For example, if you shut down an old server and start a new one in the same region the reserved pricing will apply to the new server automatically.

For further details see Amazon's website

Introducing CloudTask - a cloud batch execution tool

Liraz Siri — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:17:48 +0000

The cloud. Isn't that just a new name everyone on the latest hype bandwagon is slapping on the same old stuff? Yes. Or rather, at least the way some clueless marketing types are using it that is. With so much smoke you'd forgive the cynics for thinking there's no fire. But... there are a few genuinely interesting things an IT guy can do today that just weren't practical a few years back.

Like renting an armada of servers you could never afford to buy to parallelize a computational task and get results in an hour instead of days, weeks or even months, for exactly the same cost. Now that's kind of exciting if you can pull it off.

We came across a modest version of this problem for various routine TurnKey related maintenance tasks such as rebuilding appliances. It sure was nice to be able to fire up a server on-demand, run a batch job and be able upload new images to sourceforge at 100MB/s. Usually we would leave the batch job running overnight and terminate the server the next day or so. That wasn't so bad for non-frequent tasks, but we realized we could do better. On Amazon EC2 running 10 servers for 1 hour costs the same as running 1 server for 10 hours. That's the theory anyhow. In practice launching and controlling many servers by hand can be painful.

Obviously, a bit of clever automation would be just the ticket. I hate reinventing the wheel so I first tried surveying existing solutions, but I couldn't find any that fit our needs.

So I rolled up my sleeves, and about a month or so later cloudtask was born. It's kind of neat. If you've ever had to do this sort of thing by hand or put together an ugly mess of scripts you'll probably find cloudtask an easier and more reliable primitive to build on.

Here's the documentation.

Here's a tacky video demo I whipped up (best viewed full screen):

TurnKey 11.2, free micro instances, EBS backed cloud servers

Liraz Siri — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:37:11 +0000

TurnKey 11.2: micro instances, EBS support, built-in TurnKey DNS, security updates

We just updated the web site and the TurnKey Hub with the new TurnKey 11.2 maintenance release, which includes:

TurnKey Hub support for micro instances, Amazon's free tier and cloud servers backed by persistent network-attached storage volumes (AKA EBS backed instances).
Built-in support for TurnKey's new dynamic DNS service.
The latest security updates.

TurnKey Micro instances: 2 cents/hour or 0 cents/hour for a year with the free tier

We've added support for micro instances (613 MB RAM), Amazon EC2's smallest cloud server type which costs just 2 cents an hour to run, which is less than $15/month if you run a server 24x7. If that isn't close enough to free for you, Amazon is giving away a year's worth of micro instance usage to new users as part of their free tier program.

This means many of you will now be able to try out TurnKey in the cloud free for a year. Yay!

We would have added support for micro instances as soon as they came out except Amazon designed them to work differently from other instance types we already supported. In particular, we had to add support for EBS backed instances...

EBS backed instances: cloud servers that can be turned off any time

Up until now the TurnKey Hub only supported S3 backed instances. These are non-persistent cloud servers with temporary storage that is lost once you destroy the server. This means you can't just turn off an S3 backed instance to save usage fees when you are not using it, though you could work around this limitation by using TKLBAM to backup a cloud server before destroying it and later restoring its state into a new cloud server.

With the support we've added for EBS backed instances, this limitation has been removed. EBS is what Amazon calls its on-demand Network Attached Storage service. The catch is that the Hub has to pre-allocate a fixed size EBS volume for your cloud server to boot from. Unless you are in the free usage tier you'll have to pay an additional $0.10/GB per month in EBS storage fees for the convenience (e.g., 50GB EBS volume == extra $5/monthly). The ability to turn off servers when not in use may make up for this extra cost though.

Speaking of costs, the pricing structure on the TurnKey side is a bit different for EBS backed instances as Amazon doesn't allow vendors to add a 10% markup to hourly usage fees like we've been doing with S3 backed instances. So instead, we're probably going to be experimenting with a global fixed monthly fee for this feature. After the trial period ends (in a month or so). Currently there is no extra charge.

Note that this future extra monthly charge will not apply to micro instances.

A word of warning: EBS is not a backup replacement and EBS-backed instances still need to be backed up by TKLBAM. EBS volumes just provides data persistence. It's a network hard drive that lives in a specific Amazon datacenter. It is not a replacement for backups. For example, if the data on your EBS volume gets accidentally deleted or corrupted, without a backup system to restore from you will be out of luck. TKLBAM on the other hand provides true incremental backups, so good data can't be accidentally overwritten by bad. Also, TKLBAM uses S3, which is designed by default to provide 11 nines (99.999999999%) of storage reliability, much higher than EBS.

Security updates

As most of you know security updates are already installed automatically on first boot and nightly (by default). If you're using an older version of TurnKey this means you don't need to do anything to get the latest security fixes. But for new deployments pulling a large number of security updates over the network can take considerable time, so occasional maintenance releases that already include them are a good idea.

We're in the process of upgrading our development process so this sort of update will be easier to do in the future and can be done as frequently as necessary.

Important security notice: Your TurnKey system may no longer be receiving automatic security updates

Liraz Siri — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:37:17 +0000

I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that if your TurnKey installation is older than 2 weeks you may no longer be receiving security updates.

The good news is that you are reading this and there is a very easy fix. Either reboot your system, or log in and restart the cron service:

/etc/init.d/cron start

Until you start recron, security updates and other scheduler related services (e.g., daily backups) will not work.

What happened?

Ubuntu screwed up a recent security update. There was a nasty bug. When installed, the update breaks cron, the scheduling daemon TurnKey uses to auto-install security updates. Not good.

According to a routine report generated from the access logs on our security repository, there are currently thousands of TurnKey installations affected by this issue. Those systems are not getting automatic security updates. There's no immediate risk, but that could quickly change if a remote vulnerability is discovered in the time it takes whomever is responsible for the server to figure this out.

Make sure we can always reach you

There's moral in all of this: make sure we can always reach you somehow.

Sure, usually we don't need to get your attention regarding security issues because TurnKey is configured to auto-install updates, but as this incident shows, we can't rely on that always working.

This time we can't fix the issue on our side, since it effects the very auto-update mechanism that's usually used to fix security issues.

The best we can do is try to reach out to users and inform them that there is an issue that they need to manually intervene to resolve. Hopefully we can get through to anyone subscribed to this blog or the News and Security announcements newsletter, or that has a Hub account.

In any case, we'll soon find out from the logs on the security repository just how many of our users we can or can't reach.

Announcing TurnKey Hub v1.0 - now officially out of private beta

Alon Swartz — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:42:48 +0000

When we first announced the TurnKey Hub private beta about 9 months ago, we had limited capacity (invitation only) and a modest feature set. Since then we tested, bugfixed, removed bottlenecks and added features, constantly improving the Hub with the help and feedback from our excellent beta users. Thank you so much!

With the release of TurnKey 11 which was tightly integrated with TKLBAM and the Hub, the amount of Hub invitation requests exploded. We were prepared for this and managed to scale the Hub smoothly without any serious issues.

With several months of testing, feedback and bugfixes under our belt we are now confident enough to officially announce, a bit earlier than planned, that the Hub is out of private beta. As of today, the Hub is open to all, and new users will no longer be required to request an invitation.

Existing users can rest easy though. We will continue to carefully monitor the Hub's performance. There should be no interruptions to the service. Worse case scenario, if we start hitting unforseen capacity issues we will temprarily reintroduce the limit on new signups.

Review of notable changes since the initial release

TurnKey Backup and Migration

A few months into the private beta we announced support for TurnKey Backup and Migration (AKA TKLBAM), which amongst other uses makes previously difficult tasks such as testing your backups much easier.
In response to demand, we've added support for configurable backup retention. Users can specify how many full backups they would like to keep for any given server backup (set to unlimited by default).

TurnKey Cloud Servers

Support for TurnKey Linux 11 images (legacy images still available to ease migration).
Basic pre-launch configuration: No more having to fiddle with the default passwords after an instance launches. The Hub supports pre-seeding appliance configuration before launch. This makes up for not having console access that would usually be required for first boot configuration.
TKLBAM pre-initialization: No more having to cut and paste your Hub APIKEY to initialize TKLBAM. The Hub pre-initializes TKLBAM automatically when the instance is first launched.
Upgradeable Kernels: We've figured out how to make it easy to update the kernel via pv-grub.
Preset launch region automatically chosen by geo-location of user.

General stuff

Performance optimizations, improved stability and error handling.
Refined the look and feel with an update to the theme.
We now try harder to explain how the Hub works and what it's good for before and after you sign up. For example we've added nice visual tours of the Backup and migration and Cloud servers features.
We've added a pricing page answering frequently asked questions. Yes, the Hub is still free. You pay Amazon directly for the cloud resources you use.
Improved start page to get you going once you sign up. Once you setup your account, this transforms into a dashboard that provides a high level overview and quick access links.
New and improved notifications (growl style).
Removed invitation requirement and added support for OpenID signup and authentication.
Added functionality to change account email.
Full internationalization support (UTF-8).
APT archive geo-location API service for choosing the closest package archive.
Link to Privacy policy.

As usual, feedback is appreciated. If you don't have a TurnKey Hub account yet, go get one now or try out the demo. If you already have a TurnKey Hub account, go check out the new stuff.

The TurnKey Hub lives at: https://hub.turnkeylinux.org

TurnKey Linux 11 released (part one)

Liraz Siri — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 11:18:10 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, part 1 of the TurnKey Linux 11 release is now officially out, including 45 new images based on Ubuntu 10.04.1. We pushed out the 11.0 release candidates 3 months ago, and with the help of the community have tested the images and resolved the few remaining issues.

Part 1 mostly refreshes the existing roster of appliances in the library. In the upcoming part 2 we'll release the new appliances the community has been helping us develop over the last year. This will roughly double the size of the library.

A handful of new appliances have also been squeezed in:

Joomla 1.6

Magento

StatusNet

PrestaShop

vTiger CRM

This was mostly a side effect of the original (misguided) plan to do one big massive release with over 80 appliances.

What's changed since the release candidates

VM optimized builds: are now available, in two exciting flavors...
1. Default: this is primary downloadable VM build. Works best with VirtualBox, low-end VMWare products (Player, Workstation, Server).
2. OVF: OVF is the new VM standard supported by VirtualBox and high-end VMWare products (e.g., ESX, vSphere).
We're also working on providing images optimized for other popular virtualization platforms such as Xen, UEC / Eucalyptus and OpenVZ.
Default passwords: You no longer have to keep track of any default passwords or change them after installation. TurnKey now helps you configure them on first boot, via the console.

For headless deployments without a console, it's possible to pre-seed answers to first boot configuration questions.
/etc under git: Automatic revision control of /etc using etckeeper, as suggested by Jeremiah Snapp. If a configuration change you made breaks something, just roll it back!
LVM snapshots: Fixed LVM snapshots by adding 10% unallocated disk space to default LVM configuration. This will make it easier to add support for atomic filesystem backups in upcoming versions of TKLBAM.
Amazon EC2 / TurnKey Hub related changes:
- Hub does TKL 11: TurnKey Hub now deploys TurnKey Linux 11 images by default, though support for older legacy images is still available to ease migration.
- Basic pre-launch configuration: No more having to fiddle with the default passwords after an instance launches. TurnKey Hub now supports pre-seeding appliance configuration before launch. This makes up for not having console access that would usually be required for first boot configuration.
- TKLBAM pre-initialization: No more having to cut and paste your Hub APIKEY to initialize TKLBAM. The TurnKey Hub pre-initializes TKLBAM automatically when the instance is first launched.
- Upgradeable Kernels: We've figured out how to make it easy update the kernel.
  
  Kernel upgrades were previously not supported on Amazon EC2, because each Amazon Machine Image (AMI) had to be associated with a specific Amazon Kernel Image (AKI). Now instead of associating the image to a specific kernel, we associate it with a special EC2 compatible bootloader (pv-grub), which can bootstrap whatever kernel is configured from within the system (e.g., security fix).
Updated website documentation
- All 45 appliance pages (e.g., TurnKey Core) now reflect the latest image versions.
- Documented appliance build types.
- Updated virtualbox installation tutorial, virtualization notes, automatic security updates pages.
Bug fixes: An assortment of fixes for issues reported by the community.

See the previous announcement of the release candidates for changes since the last maintenance release (2009.10-2, based on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS).

Many, many thanks to...

Everyone who helped test the release candidates and provided ideas and feedback.
The many rivers of upstream: Ubuntu, Debian and all of the wonderful open source communities who give love and write code for the software that goes into TurnKey.
JedMeister, Adrian Moya, Basil Kurian, and Rik Goldman - pillars of the TurnKey community who have inspired us with their dedication and generosity.
TurnKey enthusiasts everywhere. Without you, TurnKey's audience, there really wouldn't be a point!

What's next

Images optimized for Xen, Eucalyptus / UEC and OpenVZ
Part 2: double the size of the library
64-bit support
Debian squeeze based beta builds (we've decided to skip Lenny)
PostgreSQL support for TKLBAM
TurnKey Hub stuff
- Support for Amazon EBS backed root devices
- Support for micro instances. Amazon's 1-year free tier will now allow free evaluation of TurnKey on Amazon EC2.
- Support for larger instances (64-bit support required).
- Support for more hosting providers.

Announcing the winners of the first TurnKey development contest

Liraz Siri — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:17:55 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, by now you are all shuddering in anticipation, dying to find out who won the very first TurnKey appliance development contest... in the history of the universe!

The stakes couldn't be higher. In truth, all three of our winners will lavish in (varying proportions of) unending fame and riches, but only one man will get the exotic, elusive embodiment of the Django pony goddess. Oh ye most blasphemous infidel will ask, why thee persists in worshiping a pony, thus pink and plush. Hush I say, tis not any earthly pony we worship, but the very symbol of the holy bond that ties all open source communities together. So say we all!

As you might recall from the summary of the contest published a few weeks ago, Basil Kurian and Adrian Moya were the two obvious candidates for the first place. We asked the community for feedback on who should win, and received hundreds of votes to the poll.

Before I announce the winners, let's give both of them a big round of virtual applause for participating in the contest and amazing us with their contributions. If it weren't for these two, the contest would surely have been a complete failure and we would have crossed off community contests from our list of good ideas. But thankfully these two heros came along, gave it their all in the true spirit of open source and now the upcoming release is going to nearly double the size of the TurnKey library. As soon as we have enough loot to give away (we're working on that) we'd like to try sponsoring more contests.

Alright, enough with the suspense. The winners:

Adrian Moya wins the gold!

First prize: $1500 and his very own pony.
Basil Kurian wins the silver!

Second prize: $800.
Rik Goldman wins the bronze!

Third prize: $100.

Cliche or not, everyone who participated in the contest is a winner in my book. We're going to be posting interviews with Adrian and Basil on the blog as soon as the release comes out, so everyone can get to know them better. Earlier we posted an interview with Rik Goldman.

Behind the scenes

Both Adrian and Basil did such fantastic work on the contest that it was hard to decide who won first place. Not just for us. Most of the community had trouble deciding as well. The most popular option in the poll was a tie, amongst both registered and anonymous users. So it was close, but Alon and I talked it over and decided it couldn't be a tie. It's a contest after all! In the real world no two quantities are exactly equal even if they sort of look that way from a distance. So if you measure accurately enough, one will have to be larger than the other, even if only by a little bit.

The problem is the closer it gets, the harder the measurement. There has to be a fair basis for deciding one way or the other.

We came up with a formula for assigning points to contributions:

Audience * Integration + Documentation

The rational behind this is that the value provided by the integration is multiplied by the size of the audience because you're providing that value over and over again to more people. The documentation adds value because it makes it easier for us to understand and adopt the TKLPatch, and it also makes it a better example for other budding community developers. But that value isn't multiplied over the entire audience, so it's an added rather than multiplied value.

When we ran the numbers through the formula Adrian got 101 points and Basil got 83.

We also looked at feedback from the community as reflected in the poll votes. To avoid bias we didn't count votes from India or Venezuela, our contestants home countries.

Non anonymous votes:

Tie (43%)
Adrian (38%)
Basil (19%)

Anonymous votes:

Tie (66%)
Adrian (24%)
Basil (10%)

As you can see most people found it difficult to decide and voted for a tie. Among the minority that decided, Adrian got roughly twice as many votes.

That's all folks. Congratulations to our winners!

New release candidates for TurnKey Linux 11.0 (part 1)

Liraz Siri — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 16:39:51 +0000

We've pushed out new RC (Release Candidates) builds for part 1 of the upcoming TurnKey Linux 11.0 release and we need your help testing them! See the appliance pages for download links.

The current crop of release candidates only include Ubuntu Lucid based ISO images for now. Debian Lenny based images will follow, as will builds specially optimized for the the full range of supported virtualization and hosting platforms (e.g., VM build, EC2 AMIs, ESX4, Xen, Eucalyptus, etc.).

In part 1 we've updated all the existing appliances except for Zimbra and Openbravo which we haven't got to yet. They'll be in part 2 along with all the fantastic new appliances developed during the community development contest.

We broke up work on the next release into two parts because with all the new appliances the size of the appliance libary is doubling and that was a bit too much to handle in one go.

Also, Alon is flying off to Orlando today for the Ubuntu Developer Summit and we wanted to have something out the door to show off to our friends in the Ubuntu community.

New versioning scheme

Instead of date based versions the new versioning scheme tracks TurnKey Core, regardless of the date or the underlying distribution.

In other words a TurnKey Linux 11.0 appliance based on Ubuntu Lucid and a TurnKey Linux 11.0 appliance based on Debian Lenny are the same version because they have the same Core features.

We're also hoping to get rid of some of the confusion with date based releases. For example, we pushed out the maintenance release 2009.10-2 in April 2010 but the version confused many people into thinking the appliances were obsolete, even though Hardy will be supported for another 3 years and security updates were installed on first boot and daily afterwards.

Now built-in: TKLBAM (TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration)

TKLBAM, which we announced a few weeks back as a separate component, is now tightly integrated with TurnKey out of the box. This includes a spiffy new Webmin module so users who dislike the command line can fully enjoy TKLBAM from the comfort of their web browser. Now you can backup and migrate fully working systems anywhere with literally just a few mouse clicks.

As an old school Unix guy who loves the command line, what I like the most about the new Webmin module is how it facilitates easy discovery of TKLBAM's functionality and ties everything together seamlessly. No need to memorize funny command line flags or decipher manual pages for configuration options. At a glance you can see what can be done. If you don't understand something you just click on the question marks for embedded help pop-ups.

Screenshot #1: backup menu

Screenshot #2: restore menu

New Core features

Besides TKLBAM integration, we've made a broad range of improvements to the Core features shared by all appliances. In fact one could argue more has changed between the last beta and the release candidate than between the previous release and the beta.

Basic configuration dialogs on first boot: Previously only ISO builds would prompt you, during installation, to configure the appliance (e.g., set passwords). Users of the pre-installed builds (e.g,. the virtual machine build for VMWare/VirtualBox) had to do basic configuration by hand.

With the new mechanism, the user experience is consistent for all build types. Also the first boot configuration mechanism is modular so appliance customizers can easily add their own hooks.
LVM (Logical Volume Management) support: instead of installing the appliance filesystem to a naked partition, we setup LVM by default. This makes it much easier to adjust storage capacity later. Also it adds basic support for filesystem snapshots, which future versions of TKLBAM may leverage to support new kinds of databases.
auto-apt-archive: uses GeoIP to automatically configure closest APT package archive for maximum network performance.
Command line convenience: a range of small improvements that make working with the command line a bit more comfortable:
1. smart, programmable bash shell completion: helps you get more done with fewer keystrokes.
2. support for $HOME/.bashrc.d hooks (see my blog post about shell hooks)
3. persistent environment variables (see $HOME/.bashrc.d/penv):
```
penv-set foo=bar
exit

# later...
echo $foo
```
Inverted webshell color scheme: real men use white on black for their command line shells. And they like it!
Display system info in the login motd: seen in the above screenshot.

Appliance specific changes

The latest and greatest: all appliances are now built using the newest software packages available with Long Term Support from Ubuntu. For software not available in the package management system (e.g., redmine), the latest stable software versions from upstream are used instead.
A range of performance optimizations: for example...
- All LAMP-based appliances now includes xcache for PHP opcode caching which improves PHP performance, as code only has to be recompiled by PHP into opcode if it changes, and not on every page load.
- All Rails based appliances now come with Ruby Enterprise which improves memory performance, traditionally one of Ruby's weak points.
Many small improvements and bug fixes
Exciting potential for new bugs: as yet unidentified.

Distribution level changes

Upgraded base distribution: from Ubuntu 8.04.3 to Ubuntu 10.04.1
- The good: newer packages based on a new Ubuntu LTS release which will be supported for 5 years.
- The bad: roughly 50MB in additional bloat for all appliances. This is mostly a consequence of bloated dependencies within the new Ubuntu version. Some of the dependencies are unnecessary for our use case (e.g., plymouth) but the only way to get rid of them is to fork the packages and we'd rather avoid that.
  
  Fortunately, the upcoming Debian Lenny based builds do not have this extra bloat so anyone who cares will have an alternative.
No more pinning: As discussed earlier we've discontinued use of complex package management configurations to achieve mixed hybrids of Ubuntu and Lucid.

In the works...

Debian Lenny based equivalent builds
PostgreSQL support for TKLBAM
Part 2 of the TurnKey with dozens of new appliances
64-bit support (it's about time!)

That's all folks! Any questions?

TKLPatch summer contest summary: let the judging begin!

Liraz Siri — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:56:01 +0000

It all started with a happy accident

I have a confession to make. This contest, which is directly fueling the largest expansion of the TurnKey library since the project started, is a happy accident. It wasn't something we planned. It wasn't on our summer todo list. It was just one of those unexpected, spontaneous ideas that light up the inside of your brain like a flash bulb, and demand you take action. Or else! (you won't get any sleep)

Back in June we had just launched the TurnKey Hub and were getting ready to focus all our energies on releasing TKLBAM. I logged into PayPal and noticed our donated beer budget had a sad little beer belly. It was just sitting there, giving me an accusing look. I felt guilty. Surely all those people who donated expected we would put these funds to better use. That's when it hit me. It was too much to buy beer, but not so much that we couldn't risk it all on a fun experiment...

I talked it over with Alon and on an impulse we decided to do a contest, but not just any contest. A wild and wet summer open source bonanza! With ponies!

What happened next took us both by surprise.

From the far corners of the globe... two superstars emerge

I figured if we were lucky we would attract about a dozen or so contributors who would create appliances for one or two of their favorite open source applications.

But what I do know. It turns out we got even luckier with two superstar developers who took different but complimentary approaches, and blew us away with over two dozen TKLPatches for an amazing range of excellent open source software, some of which we had never even heard of before!

From India, Basil Kurian went wide with about 20 relatively straightforward new appliances, developed at a furious pace that was hard to keep up with. Like a hungry bird of prey, Basil scanned the open source savanna from above, then swooped down for kills he could snatch back whole to his nest.

From Venezuela, Adrian Moya dug in deep, with about 10 relatively challenging appliances. His attention to detail rivals some of our best work to date. Adrian, like a tiger, stalked his prey, taking a slower, more deliberate approach. He went after larger targets, sunk his teeth in and tore them to pieces.

There were a few other contributions as well but the bulk of developments can be credited directly to these two admirable and highly skilled individuals.

Looking at the big picture, what they've accomplished is not only a tribute to their own impressive abilities but also to the power of the open source ecosystem they leveraged. I can't think of any other area of human enterprise where a loosely knit band of individuals is empowered (in their spare time no less) to help enable thousands of individuals and organizations all over the world to take advantage of so much technological innovation. That's what TurnKey means to Alon and I and we're delighted that more people are getting to share this experience!

Help! How do we figure out who should win?

It was probably best for the project that our two superstars took different complimentary approaches. But it complicates our decision as a direct apples to apples comparison isn't possible. That means instead of just counting the number of submissions we actually have to think this through, and we'd like the community to help us with that.

So what's at stake? You mean besides bragging rights and immortality in the TurnKey hall of fame?

Gold: $1500 (+ a make-believe pony with a suitcase full of broken dreams)
Silver: $800
Bronze: $100

Judging criteria

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help us figure out who added the most total value to the project. That means the quantity of contributions multiplied by their quality. Yes, we realize quality is inherently subjective and open to endless interpretation. We've thrown in some rough metrics and have identified dimensions of evaluation so it isn't entirely arbitrary, but let's not kid ourselves - playing with grading systems and numbers won't save us from making subjective, qualitative judgments.

To make this a bit simpler we've attempted to summarize contributions in three key dimensions:

Anticipated interest from our audience: the more people will benefit from an appliance, the more valuable it is. Unfortunately, we don't have a TurnKey crystal ball (yet), so we can only make educated guesses. Mostly we sampled data from various public resources provided by Google (e.g., Google Trends, the number of search results for a given name, the page rank of a project's web site, etc.)

Grades: minimal (), modest (), large () and huge ()
Integration effort: an appliance saves users the trouble of finding the right components, integrating them into a working solution and testing it themselves. Hard appliance integrations are more valuable because they save users more trouble.

Examples of factors we took into account when we evaluated integration effort includes:
1. how well aligned the integration is with a well defined need
2. the number of integrated components
3. whether or not pre-installation (e.g., seeding databases) was required
4. approximate testing difficulty
5. added value such as custom glue scripts
Grades: simple (), involved (), challenging () and brilliant ()
Documentation: A pre-requisite to adding an appliance to the library is that we understand what it achieves, how it does it and why. Good documentation makes all of this easier for us, and also serves to educate the community and promote discussion. Truly awesome documentation goes beyond that and adds significant value to end-users by making it easier to get started (e.g., tutorials, HOWTOs, documentation resources, etc.)

Grades: minimal (), good (), excellent (), awesome ()

Summary of submissions competing for the gold

Adrian Moya
TKLPatch	Audience	Integration	Documentation
Asterisk: VoIP PBX
Magento: ecommerce
OpenLDAP
Alfresco: enterprise CMS
Web content filtering proxy: DansGuardian + ClamAV
Big Blue Button: web conferencing
Plone: Zope-based CMS
Bacula: network backup tool
Gitorious: Git collaborative repository hosting

Basil Kurian
TKLPatch	Audience	Integration	Documentation
Mono ASP.NET: IIS replacement
vTiger CRM
Cacti: web-based graphing tool
Prestashop: e-commerce / shopping cart
SugarCRM Community Edition
Tomato cart: ecommerce
Status.NET: micro blogging
eFront: eLearning software
OrangeHRM
Vanilla forum
Groupoffice: groupware
LEMP stack: Linux, Nginx, Mysql, PHP
EyeOS: web desktop
Foswiki: structured wiki fork of TWiki
Fedena: school/campus management system
Spree: ecommerce
Retrospectiva: agile project management
Typo: rails blogware

Notes:

This is not a complete listing of submissions, just those that are most likely to be included in the upcoming release batch.
I'm linking to the forum posts where the TKLPatch submissions are discussed for future reference and so anyone who wants can make up their own mind.

Third place?

While the vast bulk of contributions came from Basil and Adrian, there were a few sporadic contributions by other community members. Here too we're interested in feedback from the community on who should win third place, or alternatively whether we should just eliminate third place and merge it with second place. Or something else...

Candidates:

Bilal: contributed a barebones Citadel appliance, and a partially completed JBoss appliance.
JedMeister: contributed a partially finished KnowledgeTree patch, researched possible integration details for the TurnKey Core Client and provided encouragement, feedback and moral support throughout the contest to all involved.
Neil Wilson: contributed a patch fixing various issues with the TurnKey Core Lucid beta.
Rik Goldman: contributed an IEP-IPP appliance, that could make it easier for school to use open source software to track students with special needs. Before the contest Rik and his band of merry students were our most prolific community appliance developers (Ampache, LimeSurvey, Elgg). Rik also contributed excellent supplemental documentation on the TKLPatch development process.

So now what? That's where you come in!

Vote on who should win and share your thoughts with the community in the comments below. If for some reason you'd rather not share your thoughts publicly feel free to contact us in a private e-mail.

TKLBAM: a new kind of smart backup/restore system that just works

Liraz Siri — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:32:47 +0000

Drum roll please...

Today, I'm proud to officially unveil TKLBAM (AKA TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration): the easiest, most powerful system-level backup anyone has ever seen. Skeptical? I would be too. But if you read all the way through you'll see I'm not exaggerating and I have the screencast to prove it. Aha!

This was the missing piece of the puzzle that has been holding up the Ubuntu Lucid based release batch. You'll soon understand why and hopefully agree it was worth the wait.

We set out to design the ideal backup system

Imagine the ideal backup system. That's what we did.

Pain free

A fully automated backup and restore system with no pain. That you wouldn't need to configure. That just magically knows what to backup and, just as importantly, what NOT to backup, to create super efficient, encrypted backups of changes to files, databases, package management state, even users and groups.

Migrate anywhere

An automated backup/restore system so powerful it would double as a migration mechanism to move or copy fully working systems anywhere in minutes instead of hours or days of error prone, frustrating manual labor.

It would be so easy you would, shockingly enough, actually test your backups. No more excuses. As frequently as you know you should be, avoiding unpleasant surprises at the worst possible timing.

One turn-key tool, simple and generic enough that you could just as easily use it to migrate a system:

from Ubuntu Hardy to Ubuntu Lucid (get it now?)
from a local deployment, to a cloud server
from a cloud server to any VPS
from a virtual machine to bare metal
from Ubuntu to Debian
from 32-bit to 64-bit

System smart

Of course, you can't do that with a conventional backup. It's too dumb. You need a vertically integrated backup that has system level awareness. That knows, for example, which configuration files you changed and which you didn't touch since installation. That can leverage the package management system to get appropriate versions of system binaries from package repositories instead of wasting backup space.

This backup tool would be smart enough to protect you from all the small paper-cuts that conspire to make restoring an ad-hoc backup such a nightmare. It would transparently handle technical stuff you'd rather not think about like fixing ownership and permission issues in the restored filesystem after merging users and groups from the backed up system.

Ninja secure, dummy proof

It would be a tool you could trust to always encrypt your data. But it would still allow you to choose how much convenience you're willing to trade off for security.

If data stealing ninjas keep you up at night, you could enable strong cryptographic passphrase protection for your encryption key that includes special countermeasures against dictionary attacks. But since your backup's worst enemy is probably staring you in the mirror, it would need to allow you to create an escrow key to store in a safe place in case you ever forget your super-duper passphrase.

On the other hand, nobody wants excessive security measures forced down their throats when they don't need them and in that case, the ideal tool would be designed to optimize for convenience. Your data would still be encrypted, but the key management stuff would happen transparently.

Ultra data durability

By default, your AES encrypted backup volumes would be uploaded to inexpensive, ultra-durable cloud storage designed to provide %99.999999999 durability. To put 11 nines of reliability in perspective, if you stored 10,000 backup volumes you could expect to lose a single volume once every 10 million years.

For maximum network performance, you would be routed automatically to the cloud storage datacenter closest to you.

Open source goodness

Naturally, the ideal backup system would be open source. You don't have to care about free software ideology to appreciate the advantages. As far as I'm concerned any code running on my servers doing something as critical as encrypted backups should be available for peer review and modification. No proprietary secret sauce. No pacts with a cloudy devil that expects you to give away your freedom, nay worse, your data, in exchange for a little bit of vendor-lock-in-flavored convenience.

Tall order huh?

All of this and more is what we set out to accomplish with TKLBAM. But this is not our wild eyed vision for a future backup system. We took our ideal and we made it work. In fact, we've been experimenting with increasingly sophisticated prototypes for a few months now, privately eating our own dog food, working out the kinks. This stuff is complex so there may be a few rough spots left, but the foundation should be stable by now.

Seeing is believing: a simple usage example

We have two installations of TurnKey Drupal6:

Alpha, a virtual machine on my local laptop. I've been using it to develop the TurnKey Linux web site.
Beta, an EC2 instance I just launched from the TurnKey Hub.

In the new TurnKey Linux 11.0 appliances, TKLBAM comes pre-installed. With older versions you'll need to install it first:

apt-get update
apt-get install tklbam webmin-tklbam

You'll also need to link TKLBAM to your TurnKey Hub account by providing the API-KEY. You can do that via the new Webmin module, or on the command line:

tklbam-init QPINK3GD7HHT3A

I now log into Alpha's command line as root (e.g., via the console, SSH or web shell) and do the following:

tklbam-backup

It's that simple. Unless you want to change defaults, no arguments or additional configuration required.

When the backup is done a new backup record will show up in my Hub account:

To restore I log into Beta and do this:

tklbam-restore 1

That's it! To see it in action watch the video below or better yet log into your TurnKey Hub account and try it for yourself.

Quick screencast (2 minutes)

Best viewed full-screen. Having problems with playback? Try the YouTube version.

The screencast shows TKLBAM command line usage, but users who dislike the command line can now do everything from the comfort of their web browser, thanks to the new Webmin module.

Getting started

TKLBAM's front-end interface is provided by the TurnKey Hub, an Amazon-powered cloud backup and server deployment web service currently in private beta.

If you don't have a Hub account already, request an invitation. We'll do our best to grant them as fast as we can scale capacity on a first come, first served basis. Update: currently we're doing ok in terms of capacity so we're granting invitation requests within the hour.

To get started log into your Hub account and follow the basic usage instructions. For more detail, see the documentation.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below. But you'll probably want to check with the FAQ first to see if they've already been answered.

Upcoming features

PostgreSQL support: PostgreSQL support is in development but currently only MySQL is supported. That means TKLBAM doesn't yet work on the three PostgreSQL based TurnKey appliances (PostgreSQL, LAPP, and OpenBravo).
Built-in integration: TKLBAM will be included by default in all future versions of TurnKey appliances. In the future when you launch a cloud server from the Hub it will be ready for action immediately. No installation or initialization necessary.
Webmin integration: we realize not everyone is comfortable with the command line, so we're going to look into developing a custom webmin module for TKLBAM. Update: we've added the new TKLBAM webmin module to the 11.0 RC images based on Lucid. In older images, the webmin-tklbam package can also be installed via the package manager.

Special salute to the TurnKey community

First, many thanks to the brave souls who tested TKLBAM and provided feedback even before we officially announced it. Remember, with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow, so if you come across anything else, don't rely on someone else to report it. Speak up!

Also, as usual during a development cycle we haven't been able to spend as much time on the community forums as we'd like. Many thanks to everyone who helped keep the community alive and kicking in our relative absence.

Remember, if the TurnKey community has helped you, try to pay it forward when you can by helping others.

Finally, I'd like to give extra special thanks to three key individuals that have gone above and beyond in their contributions to the community.

By alphabetical order:

Adrian Moya: for developing appliances that rival some of our best work.
Basil Kurian: for storming through appliance development at a rate I can barely keep up with.
JedMeister: for continuing to lead as our most helpful and tireless community member for nearly a year and a half now. This guy is a frigging one man support army.

Also special thanks to Bob Marley, the legend who's been inspiring us as of late to keep jamming till the sun was shining. :)

Final thoughts

TKLBAM is a major milestone for TurnKey. We're very excited to finally unveil it to the world. It's actually been a not-so-secret part of our vision from the start. A chance to show how TurnKey can innovate beyond just bundling off the shelf components.

With TKLBAM out of the way we can now focus on pushing out the next release batch of Lucid based appliances. Thanks to the amazing work done by our star TKLPatch developers, we'll be able to significantly expand our library so by the next release we'll be showcasing even more of the world's best open source software. Stir It Up!

TurnKey Appliance Development Contest: An Open Source Summer Bonanza!

Liraz Siri — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 06:19:45 +0000

Over the last few months donations have been trickling in and gradually piling up. Since there's a limit to how much beer we can reasonably drink we've been brainstorming ideas for using that money to help the project.

One of the ideas we liked the most was to try and sponsor an experimental contest which would hopefully stimulate community TKLPatch development, strengthen the community and teach as many people as possible the skills needed to customize existing TurnKey appliances and create new ones. It's not rocket science and you don't need to be a programmer or systems expert. Anyone willing to learn a few basic Linux skills can have fun doing it. If you want we'll even teach you how! (details below).

We're thinking of running the contest for the next 8 weeks. Then allow another 2 weeks to summarize the results and let the community help us decide who should win (e.g., a survey on the web site).

Prizes

Winners and all honorable mentions will be celebrated in obligatory blog posts, and forever immortalized in the TurnKey hall of fame. They'll also receive full bragging rights, the undying gratitude of billions of TurnKey users, and some of our excess beer money on PayPal, which they can claim for themselves or donate to a charity of their choice.

First prize: ~~$1,500~~ $100,000 + pony
Second prize: $800
Third prize: $100

Many thanks to everyone who donated to the project! We're hoping this will put your money to good use. If you like the idea and want to increase the contest pot size, feel free to donate now and ask us to dedicate the money to that.

Help us expand the next release

We're hoping to get lots of high-quality submissions, and if we do, the timing will be just right.

As many of you already know we're in the middle of a development cycle for the new Lucid and Lenny based beta appliances and we have our hands full upgrading the existing crop of appliances and introducing new features such as backup and migration. Unfortunately that means this time around we don't have the resources to expand the appliance library horizontally and add a significant number of new appliances from scratch.

Unless... well, that's where our heros come in. Adding a new appliance to the library from a TKLPatch still requires work, but it's definitely easier than creating an appliance from scratch and that means we could get more of them done.

In other words, any high-quality TKLPatch submissions we receive from the community in the next couple of months will have a very good chance of being formally adopted into the library in time for the next release.

After that the appliance library will be frozen again for a while until the next release batch.

List of ideas

In no particular order here's a list of ideas for appliances that have been sitting in our todo list for much too long and probably won't make it into the next release without the community's help:

By function (components not yet determined): terminal server replacement (I.e., remote desktops for thin-clients), ASP.NET replacement, web filtering proxy (e.g. privacy, ad-blocking, malware protection, content filtering), plug-in e-mail filter (e.g., spam/malware), unified threat management, load balancing reverse proxies.
eCommerce: Magento, VirtueMart, PrestaShop, Zen Cart, osCommerce, UberCart.
Content management: Alfresco, SilverStripe, Plone, Knowledge Tree, DSpace, Apache Roller, LifeRay.
Messaging: DimDim, Asterisk, OpenFire, Mumble, Vanilla forum, StatusNet, Zarafa, Scalix, RoundCube, OpenEMM
Business: SugarCRM, vTiger CRM, Open HRM, Apache OFBiz, GLPI
Monitoring: Nagios, Cacti, ZenOSS, Hyperic, Zabbix, OpenNMS
Infrastructure: OpenLDAP, Radius
Development frameworks: Zope, TurboGears, jBos
Management: eBox, ISPConfig
Data integration: Jasper BI, Pentaho, SnapLogic
Backup: Amanda, Bacula
IDS: Snort + Aanval, Snorby
Virtualization: Proxmox VE, Xen-DTC, oVirt, enomaly, eucalyptus
Misc: Apache Solr, iFolder, IceCast, OpenVPN ALS

If you have your own ideas for appliances you think would make good additions to the TurnKey library, don't worry if they're not on the list. All contributions are welcome. Work on whatever interests you.

Sign up for a live training session

Creating a TKLPatch isn't hard. Read the documentation and still not sure where to begin? No problem. If there's interest, we'll be giving free live training sessions on TurnKey's IRC channel showing how to build an example TKLPatch step by step and answering any questions. ~~Click here to sign up and we'll send you an e-mail with the time and date of the session.~~

UPDATE: The session is scheduled for July 25 2010, 17:00 UTC

A few guidelines

You can improve an existing appliance or create a new appliance by patching any appliance in the TurnKey library, including the new Ubuntu Lucid and Debian Lenny TurnKey Core betas.
If you're creating a new appliance, we recommend patching the new beta of TurnKey Core based on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid. This is the latest version of Ubuntu so it has the newest packages in its software repositories.
It's preferable to install software through the package management system rather than directly from an upstream tarball. It's usually much easier to install and update software this way.

Unfortunately, sometimes this won't be an option because there's a lot of excellent open source software that isn't in Ubuntu's or Debian's package repositories. In these cases try checking if the software you're looking for is at least available as a Debian package (*.deb).

If not, that's OK. An appliance doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.
In case it isn't obvious, if you include software from outside the official package repositories, make sure it's available under an open source license (e.g., GPL, BSD, etc.). Free as in free beer is not enough. Software in official TurnKey appliances must also be free as in liberty.
Publish results as soon as you have them on the forum and/or development wiki. In general, credit for a result goes to the first person who publishes. This doesn't even have to be a finished TKLPatch, though naturally finished, high-quality submissions count moure than partial results.
To avoid duplicated effort, check the development wiki before you start working on a new TKLPatch. Maybe it's already been submitted. But if you think you can make something better, don't let that stop you!
You can work alone, or collaborate as part of a group. Your choice. There's no need to register. If you're part of a group, just document who should take credit (e.g., Hans Solo, Star Wars group).
Results will be evaluated based on a quality and quantity of all submissions, including any integration notes, TKLPatches, or documentation submitted. At the end we'll summarize the results of all participants and set up community surveys to help us decide who should win.
Have fun!

Don't forget to sign up for the live training session if you're interested. Any questions?

Beta of TurnKey Core on Debian Lenny (+ Ubuntu vs Debian)

Liraz Siri — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 12:23:44 +0000

We've just uploaded to SourceForge our first ever Debian-based virtual appliance: a beta of TurnKey Core on the rock stable Lenny release.

DOWNLOAD BETA:

105MB ISO (changelog) (sig) (manifest)

It has about the same features as the Ubuntu 10.04 based Core beta we released a couple of weeks ago with a few minor exceptions (e.g., grub instead of grub-pc, byobu not included).

Ubuntu-Debian chimeras considered harmful

Most users probably don't realize it but a handful of our current crop of "Ubuntu based" appliances are actually Ubuntu-Debian chimeras. The package management system (APT) is technically capable of mixing packages from different distributions. We took advantage of that to configure some TurnKey appliances to get security updates directly from Debian for certain packages which were not supported on Ubuntu.

Unfortunately it's a relatively complicated hack that relies on poorly documented, rarely used, and consequently buggy APT functionality.

It hasn't back-fired yet, but we'd rather not wait for that to happen.

TurnKey appliances are configured to auto-update security fixes by default so safety and robustness is a key concern. We don't want to risk breaking anything in the future. Better safe than sorry!

So from now on, no more chimeras. The upcoming Ubuntu Lucid based appliances will be 100% Ubuntu, even if that means some packages don't get security updates.

Are Debian based appliances worth the trouble?

This brings us to our dilemma. Guaranteed security updates for all packages are a big deal, at least for us. And only Debian provides that.

Which got us thinking. How much extra work would it take to also build a Debian-based TurnKey Core? And would the interest from the community justify the effort?

Bottom line: it was a bit harder than we anticipated but we made it happen and now we need the community's help in figuring out if it matters.

Though we haven't committed to it yet, we are seriously considering Debian-based builds of all TurnKey Linux appliances. But that depends on the feedback we get from you and the level of interest in this.

Frankly, we don't have the resources to thoroughly test both Debian and Ubuntu based builds of all TurnKey appliances.

That means to pull this off we'll need all the help we can get testing Betas, providing feedback on issues that come up, filing and triaging bug reports, etc.

If you care about TurnKey on Debian, we'll need you to step up to the plate and help us make it happen.

Ubuntu vs. Debian: the story so far...

So far TurnKey has been known as an Ubuntu based open source project so this move towards Debian may come as a surprise to some, but those of you who have been following closely know that Debian support has actually been in our sights since TurnKey's conception.

One of our first polls asked: would you prefer virtual appliances based on Ubuntu or Debian?

Results so far (based on 763 votes):

62%: Ubuntu for both client and sever roles
23%: Debian for server roles, Ubuntu for client roles
15%: Debian for both client and server roles

Despite a clear preference for Ubuntu (which is better known due to its popularity on the desktop), a significant 38% still prefer Debian for server roles.

This resonates with us because when TurnKey was still on the drawing board a couple of years ago we debated Ubuntu vs. Debian extensively. In the end Ubuntu won by a slim margin but it was a tough call!

I'll talk a little bit about the thought process behind that because despite a couple of years going by the big picture hasn't really changed.

Back then we were mainly using Ubuntu on our desktops and Debian on our servers and frankly Debian seemed like a more natural choice for a server-oriented virtual appliance library.

The "main" problem with Ubuntu is that only a subset of packages in the "main" component are officially supported with security updates.

By contrast, Debian supported all 25,000 packages with carefully backported, well tested security fixes that could be safely applied to a production system. Debian is also rock solid in terms of stability, which is something you usually want in a server operating system, even when it comes at the expense of having the latest package versions.

On the other hand Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy), a Long Term Support version had just been released and Debian Lenny was still a work in progress. Stability comes at a price, and it's one of the main reasons for Debian's notoriously slow release cycle.

But we didn't want to wait who knew how long or start a new project on an old distribution...

Plus, we shared Ubuntu's values regarding making open source accessible to everyone, not just savvy experts. That meant encouraging a community atmosphere in which everyone was welcome and treated with respect. Which is why we adopted the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. Unfortunately, the Debian community had a reputation for being more withdrawn and elitist.

Ubuntu's popular appeal was also a factor. Let's face it, today Ubuntu has far better name recognition than Debian, though I think that's mostly due to superior marketing and more effective leadership. Having a wealthy benevolent dictator that can bankroll the operation definitely has a few advantages (and disadvantages!).

But keep in mind that though Ubuntu and Debian do inevitably compete for users in some areas, they aren't really in direct opposition. In fact, every 6 months a new version of Ubuntu begins its life from a snapshot of the unstable Debian version in development.

Certainly Ubuntu deserves credit for pushing the envelope in areas like usability, but it's Debian's self-governed volunteer workforce of over 1600 developers that do much of the unglamorous heavy lifting.

Long story short, try the beta and tell us what you think. Obviously we have immense respect for both distributions and we'd like to hear your views on where we should take it from here.

Beta of TurnKey Core on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Alon Swartz — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:00:19 +0000

Well, it took a little longer than expected, but we are pleased to announce that TurnKey Core - the common base for all appliances, has been released based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx).

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will be supported for five years.

This is a beta release, so take it for a spin, let us know what you think. If you come across any issues, please report them. If you have ideas on how to make it better, let us know.

DOWNLOAD BETA:

144MB ISO (changelog) (sig) (manifest)

All other (beta) appliances based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will be released in batches in the following weeks leading up to the official release, which is planned for the beginning of August. This is to coincide with the release of Ubuntu 10.04.1, which is recommended for production deployment.

Changes

Bootsplash

The bootsplash menu has been updated. Install to hard disk is now the first option, selected by default. Live system has been renamed to Try without installing. A warning message will be displayed when running in live non-persistent mode.

Recommended packages _not_ installed by default (APT)

This is not really a change from TurnKey Core 8.04, its actually the same configuration. The change is notable because Ubuntu (since 8.10) install recommends by default. We chose to keep the old configuration as TurnKey appliances are minimal, and only include what needs to be included. We believe this is the right decision, if you think differently, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Byobu - Screen for human beings

While attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) for Maverick, I was introduced to byobu by its developer - Dustin Kirkland. I found byobu much more user friendly than screen, as well as informative with its notification plugins (e.g., memory and processor usage, package upgrades, clock). We decided not only to include it in Core, but also launch it by default. Again, we'd love to hear your thoughts on this decision.

To get you started, here are some of the keyboard shortcuts (see the manual for more info: man byobu):

F2 - Create a new window
F3 - Move to previous window
F4 - Move to next window
F6 - Detach from this session
F8 - Re-title a window
F9 - Configuration Menu

Improved terminal

The bash configuration has been customized to included colored output (ls, grep, etc.) as well as a 2 level max prompt (e.g., instead of /usr/share/doc/foo/bar/xyz only bar/xyz will be displayed). The bash-completion package is also installed by default, which we find very useful. In addition, we have also added ~/bashrc.d support seeded with some configuration scripts, one of them being penv which Liraz and I use all the time, more on that later...

Syslog upgrade

The system and kernel logging packages (sysklogd and klogd) have been replaced with rsyslog, an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd with awesome features. This change is inline with Ubuntu who made the move in Ubuntu 9.10. The Webmin syslog configuration has been tweaked accordingly.

GRUB-PC (aka. GRUB2)

Our installer (di-live) has gone through a major upgrade and now supports GRUB-PC, a cleaner design of its predecessors with more advanced features. The default configuration has been slightly tweaked to display a timeout by default, run in console mode, and be more verbose.

All other changes are available in the changelog.

Features

Base distribution: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
Runs on bare metal in addition to most types of virtual machines (e.g., VMWare, VirtualBox, Xen HVM, KVM).
Installable Live CD ISO:
- Supports installation to an available storage device.
- Supports running in a non-persistent (demo) mode.
Auto-updated on firstboot and daily with the latest security patches.
Easy to use configuration console:
- Displays basic usage information.
- Configure networking (supports multiple network interfaces).
- Reboot or shutdown appliance.
Ajax web shell (shellinabox) - SSH client not required.
User friendly screen wrapper (byobu) launched by default on login.
Easy to use web management interface (Webmin):
- Listens on port 12321 (uses SSL).
- Mac OS X themed.
- Network modules:
  - Firewall configuration (with example configuration).
  - Network configuration.
- System modules:
  - Configure time, date and timezone.
  - Configure users and groups.
  - Manage software packages.
  - Change passwords.
  - System logs.
- Tool modules:
  - Text editor.
  - Shell commands.
  - Simple file upload/download.
  - File manager (needs support for Java in browser).
  - Custom commands.
Regenerates cryptographic keys on first boot:
- SSL certifcate used by webmin, apache2, lighttpd - /etc/ssl/certs/cert.pem.
- SSH keys.
Console auto login when running in live/demo mode.

Default credentials (for Webmin and SSH):

username root
no password (user sets password during installation)

Call for testing and feedback

We need your help in testing the beta releases, and your feedback to make the official release rock! What are you waiting for, get it here.