If you know me, then you know I'm a huge fan of Trac and Subversion for managing software development. If you've ever wanted to give it a try, now there's no excuse not to with preconfigured Virtual Appliances Just download, boot, and go.
Awhile ago I had set up a Linux box on my home network with Trac and Subversion and documented my process here. I admit that I'm not a very good Linux system administrator. I'm a developer, and I write code. Someone else has always managed the development boxes, or they were outsourced to a company like CVSDude or ProjectLocker. The point is, sometimes getting up and running with Trac and Subversion isn't just a one-click install process, and usually takes some time to get everything configured and working properly.
That's why I was excited to find out that you can get a complete working agile development box up and running in no time thanks to VMWare's Virtual Appliances. By downloading the free VMWare Player, and a system image with Trac and Subversion already installed, you can just load the system image and boot it up to immediately start using it for development.
There are a few preconfigured Trac and Subversion images if you search the VMWare Virtual Appliance directory. Two that I've found are Helix Agile Development and Buildix from ThoughtWorks. There are probably others as well if you spend a little more time searching.
I'll admit that I haven't actually downloaded and run with these yet (since I have that Linux box I've already configured), but I plan on investigating these sometime in the future. Hopefully having these servers ready-to-go will help someone out there get up and running with Trac and Subversion much easier. It's the best development environment I've ever programmed in...
Sounds really cool, Darron. Thanks for sharing! Pretty soon, it's all going to be virtual appliances run in an Amazon data center somewhere, isn't it? :)