Wow. I really appreciate the detailed response. Thank you for not taking anything for granted (SFTP vs FTP). I'm a rookie, after all. Thanks to you, Jeremy, I'm logged in to the PrestaShop Administration panel right now.

I remember reading about PuTTY's copy/paste ability when I was researching this problem, and from reading the site documentation here and at PrestaShop's website, I knew to access the internal site via a browser.

What I didn't know is that I was already completely finished with setup and configuration of the appliance. I guess I just thought that logging in at the prompt at that point would open a Linux desktop or something. I also didn't know that Webshell is another way of accessing the console. Judging from your answer, I really shouldn't need to log in to the console anyway.

I still don't know why I can't type those two symbols (only @ and #) within the VM console window. The problem doesn't exist in Webshell, obviously, because it's in the browser. Of course, as you said, the user name is root, not the PrestaShop email address, so there's no @ symbol necessary. When the console shows "prestashop login," it really means "appliance root" login, right?

So now I have to ask another rookie question...does the console window need to stay open even though I've already accessed PrestaShop via the browser? Also, if I can't get to a Linux desktop, how do I install the VirtualBox Guest Additions? I have another question, too, about upgrading PrestaShop from within the appliance via their "1-Click" AutoUpgrade rather than upgrading the appliance itself (the latest appliance and upstream source for PrestaShop is dated June, but the PrestaShop version is still not the latest version from April), but I will ask that in a new topic.

Thanks again. I already felt confident in my choice to go with TurnKey Linux based on my comparison with other solutions. Basically, I wanted to focus on the site itself, not the Linux and Apache learning curve and I wanted the development environment to be as close as possible to the hosting environment to further minimize the learning curve.

TurnKey addresses both, and now I'm confident in the support, as well.

Stephen