I have started down the path of virtualizing my desktop to ease development...I am currently running VirtualBox with Debian running as a staging server...I am about to start the process of building a development server -- which I can then clone for each new user/developer on our team as required (instead of having them manually configure the various systems required).
However, I am curious whether a bash script might still be better...it's documentation of what and how everything has been configured (short of changing conf files, etc).
When I call upon debians apt-get install apache2 it knows how and where to configure everything so it just works...I would like something similar for Google App Engine...do debian packages invoke scripts to create default users, etc?
Something like this sounds about what I want to do...is it common among Linux admins?