Acquia Drupal's been generating some decent buzz in the open source CMS community, especially because Dries Buytaert, the original creator of Drupal, is the CTO of the company. Instant cred.

Acquia's business model is simple and smart: take Drupal, create some support products and modules, toss in the contributed modules we're all using anyway (Views, CCK, Markdown, etc) and release a free distribution. It's a smart move, and after having worked with it for a couple days, I can confidently say that most of my Drupal sites will use Acquia's distro as the basic foundation.

Now, I had a bunch of notes from my installation experience, but there were all on my Lenovo laptop that passed on peacefully in its sleep a couple nights ago, and I'm still doing recovery on the disk. But from memory, here's what I thought:

• Installation is pretty much the same except for the Acquia Drupal logo and a couple of extra text fields for your Acquia account credentials...these are only required if you subscribe to one of Acquia's managed support plans.
• Included modules are the creme de la creme: Views, CCK, Administration Menu, Pathauto, Date, Calendar...probably 80% of the modules that I always download to a new Drupal server are bundled.
• The two Acquia themes, Marina and Slate, look really nice, much nicer than the default Garland theme. Maybe it's just because I've gotten so sick of the Garland theme that I'm just ready for something new, but I think you could use the darked toned "Slate" theme on a live site with minimal modifications and it would look decent.
• The Apache Solr search module is included. If you've not checked this out, you need to do it right now. It's a faceted search that makes you wonder why anyone would pay Endeca or Mercado. If you have a site with a good content depth that is taxonomized, you need to check this thing out. I've downloaded and installed the Solr/Lucerne software and installed it on my servers, but Acquia is also offering a SAAS solution for those who are leery of screwing with a server.

I would imagine that the power of Acquia Drupal is really unleased if you subscribe to one of Acquia's services, which Anova will probably do in the future as our number of live Drupal sites continues to escalate.