If you’ve ever went to the trouble of setting up WordPress on a Windows machine yourself, going through a PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin installation, then sort through all the IIS crap you run into you’ll love TurnKey Linux virtual appliances (aka pre-installed virtual machine boxes).
You can for example download a WordPress appliance which has all the stuff mentioned above pre-installed, launch it in VMWare Player, go through a 5 minute config et voilà! You have your very own virtual Ubuntu box up and running with a fully functioning fresh WordPress install on it. You can even flex your 1337 Linux command line skillz through “Shell in a box” which simulates a shell window in your browser. Or you can use SFTP/SSH. Wickedness indeed.
There’s more fun to be had though. Lot’s of other cool appliance are available containing tons of Open Source Software to be messed with. There’s a LAMP stack, one for Drupal, Ruby (how hip!) etc. Not quite geeky enough for ya? Well alright, go ahead then, get one of those appliances and upload it to Amazon EC2 and be all “in the cloud”. Cause they can do that you know. Oh yeah.
Don’t know if it’s a good idea though. Security wise and all.
(*) If you have VMWare Player installed and already downloaded the zip file of course. :)
Photo by MissMaze, cc-licensed.