EXCLUSIVES

Terra Soft > Apple Linux

By Chris Mace
Images Provided by Terra Soft Solutions
January 2004

Based at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Loveland, Colorado, Terra Soft Solutions delivers integrated PowerPC Linux solutions throughout the world. They are open-source junkies, but the "Terra" in their name points to another obsession, a love of the outdoors. Nearly all employees are avid rock climbers (they site contains a "Recycling for Profit" page, an eccentricity among non-industrials).

Kai Staats and Dan Burcaw merged their visions of how a niche Linux company might prosper into Terra Soft. While it's cliche to talk about their "unique corporate culture," they really do have a good thing going.

They average a staff of eight, and write their own web-based environments for all of their projects - such as for their online store and shipping and support - citing the productivity of Linux computers as the reason they don't need a larger staff. Since Kai and Dan are both Mac enthusiasts and open-source developers and proponents, they have come up with a solution to combine those two worlds: Yellow Dog Linux.

YDL is a Red Hat Linux port, built specifically for PowerPC (IBM, Moto) CPUs, while Red Hat is primarily built for x86 (Intel, AMD) CPUs. Terra Soft's egregious co-founder Kai explained that, like Red Hat, "Yellow Dog runs native on the hardware, not in emulation nor on top of another operating system." Yellow Dog Linux is exclusively for PowerPC computers, including Macs.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then being proactive with invention is good for business. Kai says that transitioning from a "sole-proprietorship" (a website development and marketing consulting firm) into Terra Soft, an internationally recognized corporation, was the result of a "desire for perfection," running on the foundation of a winning operating system.

Terra Soft began in January 1999 and has since gained international recognition for its award winning PowerPC Linux distribution. Used in the home, and by developers, systems administrators, researchers and scientists, YDL is pretty much the gold standard for PowerPC Linux distribution. They estimate about 250,000 computers to be on their installed user base. The Apple product line remains at the center of Terra Soft's efforts, and makes up the majority of their business.

Terra Soft maintains a strong commitment to the open-source philosophy, as their websites declares: "We attempt balance in our lives so that our work environment is not a battleground between what we must do and what we want to do, but instead, a place where we want to do what we must." These guys are serious.

The open-source community represents "an almost utopian means of conducting business," according to Kai, who causally speaks of a world-wide network of devoted niche experts working day and night, talking in chat-rooms to perfect the video, sound, or the speed of drives and Ethernet transmissions: "[Our] mutual goal is to improve an entire operating system one piece at a time." The members of this community do it out of interest, or because their employers are fond of open-source, or they are well-paid developers - but also because "they enjoy the fact that Linux scares the shit out of Microsoft."

YDL is 100 percent open-source, all of the kernel code is freely available to anyone to modify and use it, as are the drivers and applications created with it. Kai explained that this translates to no viruses, because people aren't hiding code in convoluted script, and it contributes to higher development speed and a sense of being a part of something bigger, which imparts "satisfaction and pride."

Last August they fulfilled a large contract for the U.S. Navy through Lockheed Martin, which is a frequent Navy supplier that meets form-factor requirements for density and performance. Terra Soft developed a "turn-key" solution for the Navy using Linux. United States Navy submarines utilize on-board HPC (high performance computing - at least more so than you average powerful desktop) clusters for real-time image processing.

The clusters are also used aboard submarines to analyze SONAR data instantly, in order to navigate and chart courses or to target weapons, according to Kai, who helped design the system for Lockheed. The clusters are 100 percent open-sources, use relatively inexpensive "commodity hardware" and are easy for the seamen who depend on them to fix or replace. These systems are revised and upgraded on a rotational basis. Lockheed chose Apple Xserves and YDL because the combination is twice as dense, consumes less power and is cheaper.

"Linux is highly flexible," says Kai, "as with the Lockheed Martin project, you simply could not do with OS X what we did with Linux for Lockheed without reducing OS X back to its BSD core, in which case, you might as well run Linux. As most Department of Energy and Defense labs currently use Red Hat Linux on x86, Lockheed was coming from a Red Hat-based product (our solution replaced Intel systems)."

YDL runs on Macs as old as the 6100, 7200, 8500 and as new as the G4 Xserves and G5 towers; requires a little as 32MB (no GUI) or 64 MB (GUI) RAM (more RAM is always better); can be (carefully) installed in less than 1 GB (with the default configuration via the installer - less with fine tuning), or 2 GB for the full suite; ships with over 1000 packages, including a full complement of server, development, security applications; home/office and productivity; three word processors, two spreadsheets, three or four web browsers, four email clients, and developers are working day and night to take it further. www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/why/