TurnKey Linux maintains ready-to-run server images for apps like GitLab and writes about them, EC2 backups and containers.
HN commenters mention it as an easy way to set up GitLab and other apps from VM images, though one notes its GitLab version was badly outdated.
Depending on your needs, Bitnami [0] and TurnKey Linux [1] offer preconfigured batteries-included VMs (among other options) that might lower the barrier to entry. (I'm not affiliated with either, but have enjoyed using Bitnami's stacks.)
In particular, I have found Bitnami's Jenkins stack to be helpful for quickly spinning up a prototype and focusing on Jenkins rather than than installing+configuring databases and other stuff. I think it took me about an hour to be up and running with Bitnami's Jenkins VM, including download and provisioning time. It then took me quite a bit longer to coax Jenkins into building my stuff correctly.
Installing and configuring databases and other subsystems may eventually be necessary depending on scale. For my prototyping and learning needs, I've greatly benefited by working with self-contained VMs like Bitnami's. It's an option to consider, at least.
[0] http://bitnami.com/stack/jenkins
[1] http://www.turnkeylinux.org/jenkins
Funny, I just looked for that. Make her take the red, not the blue pill Morpheus. Let her solve problems on her own, don't instruct, but give usefull hints. If she has or you have any question, just ask, don't be shy. I or someone else is sure there to help (just in case you/she need it).
For easy php stuff: http://www.square7.ch/
A real shell and more:
http://shells.red-pill.eu/
(Btw. I recommend SuSE or Ubuntu for the beginning, Sabayon, Gentoo or Arch later when she's good enough and wants more. But I'm sure she would perform well on a Mac too, Macs teach you to become a consumer though)
I recommend her to NOT install LAMP or XAMP.
She should use a prebuilt appliance from http://turnkeylinux.org instead. That will teach her howto sftp too. KDE and Gnome integrate sftp into their "Explorer", just ask or google and you will find howto do use that without a "FTP-Client".
Agreed. I saw "turnkey rails" in the sidebar and thought I'd take a look into it. It's very unclear what versions of software are included. The last changelog entry on 2011/12/06 says nothing about ruby or rails versions. The last mention was 2011/01/27 claiming REE 1.8.7-2010.02_i386_ubuntu10.04.
To give a perspective on update frequency, according to the same page (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/updates/rails), two updates before that was Fri, 2009/10/23 - 16:35. This update claims to have ruby 4.1 installed. It seems that their VM image also includes a time machine.
Not getting a huge feel of confidence from that being featured on their landing page. An open market can be good, but when it comes to supplying an image for my production env, that type of thing could leave me feeling a bit uneasy.
Route53 is an excellent service, and the latest price reduction makes it even more attractive - but using the API directly as an end user is a little cumbersome, especially for cloud servers.
A while ago I thought "wouldn't it be great if when launching a cloud server some magic would happen and the server would get assigned a human/friendly name of my choice? I'm tired of remembering IP addresses, and logging into my DNS management console to setup records."
Following that thought we added Domain management and a free dynamic DNS service to the TurnKey Linux Hub.
If anyone is interested:
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/hub-domains (announcement)
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/hubdns (documentation)
https://github.com/turnkeylinux/hubdns (source code)
This looks interesting to use a vm dev machine. Install it under vmware or something alike on your mac/pc and run your sites/apps live over there.
It seems to me there are huge advantages to doing that because if your run mamp on your mac for web development your quickly bump into problems like installing memcached or non-mac services. You also get more experienced with linux..
There actually already is something available for this called TurnKey Linux (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/).
A quick hint, if you do develop sites locally on your mac and get annoyed with Mac's weird dns lookup (.local, skipping the hosts file if it's not in a specific format.. etc) check out Dnsmasq (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnsmasq). You can install it on your mac using port.
This sort of thing led me to doing all development on a per-project Linux virtual machine. I started by using various development stacks (LAMP, LEPP, whatever) running under VMWare Fusion, using appliances from http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ or http://bitnami.org/. Then I discovered Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/), which is a nice command-line driven tool for managing and provisioning base images. I use it for everything now.
You can run Lion virtualized under OS X, if you are so inclined, but I don't see any advantage to doing so.
I like the isolation of environments so much that even if I were to switch to Linux as my day to day OS, I would still develop every project in a VM.