This blog is running on a Turnkey WordPress appliance (www.turnkeylinux.org). Virtual appliances are of course fantastic if they work – a fully configured, just-works server which you can download and provision in seconds (this blog took about 5 minutes to download, install on a VMWare Server virtual machine and get running). Until now, most appliances we tried had enough gotchas to make us return to manual installation on a generic distribution, but the Turnkey appliances seem to be perfect. Based on Ubuntu or Debian and with just enough stuff pre-installed to make them useful, while still being compact enough to compete with a manual installation. Thanks Turnkey!