TurnKey Linux, an Israeli startup, has taken the wraps off a dozen open source, server-based appliances tailored to work with Canonical's Ubuntu 8.04.

Explaining how the servers are presented to users, a company spokesman said each of the 12 appliances is packaged as a single "universal" image that can install a pre-integrated turnkey server offering in a matter of minutes.

The releases include appliance servers for LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Joomla, MediaWiki, Drupal, LAPP, Django, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

The servers typically have a footprint of approximately 150 MB and are each capable of supporting installations on both physical and virtual machines, including VMware, Xen, VirtualBox, and KVM.

The appliances are built on top of the company's TurnKey Core appliance, which has a footprint of 100 MB. Some of the capabilities of the Core appliance include SSL support along with a rich Web administration interface.

TurnKey officials think the appliances can serve as the base for helping developers and users to more intelligently piece together products from the thousands of possible open source components.

"The largest Linux distributions have over 23,000 packages," TurnKey co-founder Liraz Siri said. "However, currently it can still take considerable skill and effort to cherry-pick the right components and glue them together."

The intent of the TurnKey products is to offer secure but fast-performing appliances that would work hand-in-glove with on-demand-oriented infrastructures, including cloud computing deployments.

In related news, TurnKey Linux officials said they're privately testing versions of their appliances for Apache Tomcat, WordPress, and phpBB.

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