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