newbie question. I downloaded the iso and created cds but, does the live cd have a gui for each appliance? i get command prompts for the appliance but no set of commands to work with? Am i doing this right?

The appliance have "kind of" gui if form of webadmin control panel - from there you cane preform most of day-to-day activates, not touching the command line. Address of webadmin is displayed on blue screen, after your appliance have properly booted up.

I've seen the screen shots that are displayed for each appliance. I didn't see any of these screens. I created the live cd (burned the iso file to cd) and booted the live cd.
The screen scrolls and displays all the program that are being loaded.
once everything is completed.. I get a prompt say like joomla "root@joomla" is this how it
works and if so do I enter a command to make it work?

Did you choose "Live system" after booting the cd ? It might be some wired hardware issue with your server ...

In my experience its easer to start via virtualbox as live machine.
Instructions are here: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/installation-appliances-virtualbox

Yes, I used the live system after booting the cd. I will try your solution by using virtualbox as live machine. I'm not sure about any hardware issue but, if it works under virtual box. i believe I can rule it as a hardware issue thank you. if it works I'll set the status to problem solved. again thank you

I've got the virtual box working. I'm a newbie on virtual machines. I saw the configuration menu.
What do you recommend for installation?. Do you recommend to hard disk? How many virtual machines can I have on my pc? I'm sorry I know it's alot of questions to get the the cd's to work but,
I would like to try them and I would eventually want to use one to develop a web server running ruby on rails and mysql and apache.. thanks for all your help...

It is good idea to install to hdd, your changes, that you will make to the appliance will not be gone after next reboot.

Max amount of virtual machines depends mainly from ram in your desktop machine. I run 5 various machines (including additional desktops) with no problem on 3 years old imac with 2gb of ram.

LOL! you've got alot of memory... I'm running on xbuntu with 256kb of ram..I saw the specs in the virtualbox documentation. I am way underneath min. requirements and It's hard to get ram for my old toshiba.Heck I was able to get the vm to work with 128kb of ram. It's almost ten years old and slow. but, when in installed xubuntu and logged into the net. It never ran that fast on the internet. In fact, I moved all my old machines to ubuntu flavored os. I may have to use my dell it has one gig and I was able to get the vm to work but, for some reason it doesn't recognize the media. It always says media unreadable or could not read boot medium. again.. thank you for your help...I've learned quite alot and even though it's alot of effort. It's fun.. thanks. I'll try all the cd's and boot them through the hdd. I'll let you know how I'm fairing.
I'll leave this as solved and if I have any other questions I'll open another question... thanks.