TurnKey Sponsors Appliance Development Contest

Do you like developing virtual servers and helping the open-source community?  Do you also enjoy winning money and/or the esteem of your peers?  If so, TurnKey Linux’s appliance development contest might be just the way for you to put your leisure time to good use this summer.  Read on for details.

TurnKey Linux is an open-source project that builds virtual appliances for use in the Amazon EC2 cloud.  Its aim is to make the deployment of cloud-based virtual machines as simple as turning a key, so that users can launch servers pre-configured for a specific task in a few seconds, rather than having to build them from scratch.

TurnKey’s appliances, which are based on Ubuntu Server Edition, already include a number of popular applications, such as Mediawiki, Joomla, WordPress and a simple LAMP stack.  But TurnKey’s developers are hoping to leverage contributions from the community to expand their inventory of virtual appliances.

The Contest

That’s where TurnKey’s contest, announced on Monday, comes in.  The project’s leaders are offering cash prizes for submission of new virtual appliances, and suggest a number of applications that could be turned into virtual machines using the TKLPatch tool.

So whether you’ve always wanted to explore virtual-appliance development but never had time, or are already an EC2 guru, check out TurnKey’s contest.  You’ll be helping make the free-software world a better place, and might even win some money in the process.

Addendum: Debian-Based Virtual Appliances

This is somewhat of a sidenote, but we can’t end this post without mentioning another important development in the TurnKey project of late: the decision to release Debian-based virtual appliances as well as Ubuntu ones.  Red Hat, Suse and Gentoo lovers may still be left in the cold, but TurnKey users now at least have a bit of choice when deciding which Linux distribution they’d like to use with their virtual servers.

That may not seem like a big deal at first glance.  Ubuntu and Debian are quite similar architecturally, after all; moreover, when it comes to virtual appliances, the operating system is often not as important as the applications it serves.

However, given the many differences between Ubuntu and Debian’s development and support cycles, they don’t fit the needs of all users equally well, so being able to choose between the two distributions is certainly a good thing.