Or you could just use an appliance:

See the second half of this page starting with
"Setting Up A Pre-Packaged WordPress Appliance"
http://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-build-a-speedy-wordpress-sandbox-vm/

Gerry
(the first part of the article looks good too...)

On Mon, 25 Mar 2013, David S. Cargo wrote:

> I want to create a sandbox system to experiment with WordPress.
>
> I've got a still-shiny Windows 8 laptop that I have installed
> VirtualBox on.
>
> I've been experimenting with some light distros (Puppy and SLAX)
> just to see how the run in the virtual environment (not so good
> with Puppy, and fine, but limited with SLAX).
>
> I also have an lubuntu 12.04 that runs fine.
>
> I used the Synaptic package manager to download and install a bunch
> of extra packages that are not part of the base install. I've got
> WordPress downloaded and installed, but not yet properly configured.
> (It doesn't seem to install itself "out of the box" and I still need
> to figure out how to get it connected with MySQL.)
>
> Are there better light-weight distros for this application? An easy
> to install WordPress might not be possible, but I thought I would
> ask.
>
> Any favorite distros for running in VirtualBox?
>
> Thanks.
>
> escargo
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>

-- 
Gerry Skerbitz
gsker at skerbitz.org