You will be able to build and deploy virtual appliance in few clicks !!

Access to a wide range of open source OSs and projects catalogue. Join a fast growing community and share your favorite appliance with your colleagues.

The platform manages the life cycle of your virtual appliance : access to a private software appliance library, control versioning, updates and cloning.

The company is ramping up to the cloud!!!

Free account available

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/virtual-appliance

I’m kind of puzzled that Chris would write a post about Ubuntu virtual appliances and not mention TurnKey Linux, an Ubuntu based virtual appliance library with over 40 Ubuntu based appliances:

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

You can deploy those. Right now. On bare metal, virtual machines and in the cloud.

Debian packages were never really designed for this sort of thing and trying to force them into that role raises the bar by making things overly complicated.

Incidentally, we’ve given some thought to getting the community more involved with appliance development recently released TKLPatch, a simple way to customize and extend any appliance in the TurnKey Linux virtual
appliance library. It’s extremely simple and should work for non-TurnKey appliances as well:

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/tklpatch

New appliances can be built as patches to the closest starting point in the library (e.g., TurnKey Core, LAMP, Django, Rails, Tomcat).

BTW, we’re building out TurnKey Linux as a specialized extension of the Ubuntu community that focuses on appliance development. Some people confuse the project for a fork but if you take a look at an appliance under the hood you’ll see it is pretty much a standard installation of Ubuntu that has been customized for a particular usage scenario. We just give users a better starting point. Like Ubuntu, TurnKey Linux is 100% open source.

Anyhow, we’ve invested a ton of effort into figuring out all of the issues and we’d like to invite any one interested in appliance development to collaborate with us. Reinventing the wheel is such a poor use of the community’s resources.

Once we add an appliance to the project we assume the burden of maintaining it at the appliance level with regular updates. This frees you to focus on more interesting tasks (e.g., improving quality of integration, software sub-components).

Cheers
Liraz Siri

Thanks for the tip on stronger lead-in sentences; I’ll try to focus more on that.