I’ve already used the LAMP Turnkey appliance to deploy several Yii sites in the past, and now with their latest version (12.0) they have a Turnkey Yii appliance. It is Debian based, and it literally takes minutes to deploy a fully functional and secure server.
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/yiiframework
This is perfect for new users with Yii, it is much easier to set this up than configuring a server on their windows machine, messing with PATH, and all of the Yii CLI questions and problems. Maybe someone should write up a tutorial and start pointing new users this way?