Unix-like Systems

Linux has been getting an increasing amount of attention lately, in part because of it's improved managabilty and security, but also because of its Open Source and free nature. Linux isn't new to us at all, and most of our staff have been running Linux boxes commercially for over a decade. Nowadays we tend to use BSD derived systems (FreeBSD & OpenBSD in particular) - they simply work better for what we want to do - but if you're interested in migrating all or parts of your organisation over to Linux or a unix based system we can help.

FreeBSD is our favourite unix, but it's not as well known as Linux. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It's used by companies like Yahoo and Amazon. They've got a page here which covers some of the reasons we like it, but it's difficult to say exactly why it's so good.

Here's a quote from a Salon.com article that we like. "By demonstrating the power of cooperative software development, and by strengthening the software backbone of the Internet so it could further nurture such development, BSD helped enable the creation of a medium that will do more to spread free speech than anything hitherto constructed. Power to the people, from the code."

FreeBSD has a legacy, and we use it time after time because it "just works". It's consistant, stable and cutting edge. Netcraft monitor the top internet sites for availability. The top performing machines are always FreeBSD.