TurnKey MediaWiki Live CD For Linux

TurnKey MediaWiki Live CD is an open source distribution of Linux based on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system and designed from the ground up to provide users with a simple, straightforward and easy-to-use software appliance for deploying dedicated MediaWiki servers with minimum effort.

MediaWiki is an open source and powerful Wiki engine, originally engineered to serve the needs of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The appliance comes with all of the upstream MediaWiki configurations, tweaked to use Tidy for compliant and clean HTML code, as well as support for image uploading and resizing.

It includes several MediaWiki extensions, among which we can mention mediawiki-extensions-base, mediawiki-extensions-collection, mediawiki-extensions-confirmedit, mediawiki-extensions-geshi, and mediawiki-extensions-openid.

Support for secure connections using the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) technology, a Postfix mail server for sending emails to users, and Webmin modules for configuring PHP, Apache and MySQL are also included.

The mwlsext script will make sure that the available/enabled extensions are displayed correctly. While the default username for the SSH, phpMyAdmin, MySQL and Webmin components is root, the default MediaWiki username is admin.

The appliance is distributed as Live CD ISO images, specifically engineered to be compatible wih the 64-bit (amd64) and 32-bit (i386) instruction set architectures. In addition to the Live CDs, this TurnKey edition is available for download as VM (Virual Machine) images for the OpenNode, OVF, OpenVZ, OpenStack and Xen virtualization technologies.

For users' convenience, the appliance features a website logo, which is stored in /var/lib/mediawiki/images/logo.png, as well as administrative emails and website name set in /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php.

The text-mode installation provided via the Live CD ISO images takes only a few minutes and requires users to partition the disk drive and choose where to install the boot loader. After the installation, users will be able to enter new passwords for the system administror account, the MySQL 'root' account, and the MediaWiki 'admin' account.