TurnKey Canvas Live CD For Linux

The TurnKey Canvas Live CD is a free and open source software appliance based on the award winning Debian GNU/Linux operating system. It contains all the necessary server-oriented components for deploying dedicated Canvas servers with minimum effort.

Canvas is an open source learning management system designed to help both administrators and teachers save hours in heir institutions and classes. The appliance comes with all of the upstream Canvas configurations, which are installed by default in /var/www/canvas.

The Canvas installation has been pre-configured to use the MySQL database server, includes automated jobs daemon initscript, the Apache web server with passenger and SSL support, and Node.JS for compiling assets.

Among other features, we can mention out-of-the-box support for secure connections using the latest SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) implementation, a Postfix mail transfer agent bound to localhost and designed for sending emails to users, and Webmin modules for configuring Apache, Postfix and MySQL.

The appliance is distributed as two Live CD ISO images and five virtual machine images. While the Live CDs are usually used for installing the operating system on any 64-bit or 32-bit computer, the virtual machine images support the Xen, OpenVZ, OpenStack, OpenNode and OVF virtualization technologies.

The default username for the Webmin, SSH and MySQL components is root, and the default Canvas username is admin. During the first boot initialization process, users must enter new passwords for the aforementioned accounts, as well as a valid email address for the Canvas 'admin' account and the domain to serve Canvas.

Optionally, it is possible to enable the TurnKey Backup and Migration or TurnKey Domain Management and Dynamic DNS services during the first boot configuration process. At the end of the installation, you can view the active services (SSH, SFTP, Webmin, Web Shell) for this appliance, so make sure that you write down their IP addresses and ports.