Posts Tagged ‘linux’

Now offering “Amazon Web Services” Consulting

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

You heard about Cloud Computing. You thought about moving your servers and websites to the cloud. You did some research and found the leader in cloud infrastructure: AWS, Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com). You look deeper into starting an AWS system, then you realize it is overwhelmingly geeky. Yes, AWS can be a bear to setup the first time.

We are here to help. Carp Data is now offering its AWS expertise as a consulting service. We use Amazon Web Services for all our hosting and web applications. We consult with you to setup, manage, and train your staff to use all the great tools from Amazon: Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), Simple Storage Service (S3), Relational Database Service (RDS), and so on.

An Amazon server, now called a “node” in the cloud, starts around $75/month with full root access. Build a web farm with load balancing and a redundant relational database for less than $250/month at Amazon.  Great commodity pricing, however, doesn’t help if you don’t have the resources to implement the plan.  That’s where we come in.  We consult with you every step of the way, as little or as much help as you need.

Contact Us to get started in The Cloud.

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Walmart sells Linux machine

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

I couldn’t believe my eyes either.  Seems as if Walmart is selling a Linux machine, the gPC, for $199 (no monitor) this 2007 holiday season.  They are already sold out as of 12/2.  I did a little further digging to find the gPC is running on gOS, a flavor of Ubuntu distro. 

 I downloaded the gOS image from Think gOS’s website and gave it a test drive on a virtual machine.  I have to admit, it’s a very clean Linux distrobution suited for the home desktop web user.  I’m guessing the “g” in gOS is for Google.  The desktop is preloaded with many Google centric features.  The o/s also comes pre-installed with OpenOffice.  Ubuntu is a close cousin to Debian (what we use here at Carp Data), so I was very familiar with it’s package management.  The install was very simple (you wouldn’t have to install if you bought the pc from Wally World), and hides much of the complexities that often scares off people to Linux.

The hardware is adequate for a web user.  The Walmart gPC comes with 1/2gig ram and 80gig harddrive.  This is no way a beefy machine by today’s standards, but it’s plenty for your average consumer to surf the web, check email, and google to their hearts content.  Which frankly, even as an über-geek, is about all I do on the internet.

I don’t subscribe to the us-verses-them mentality in the operating system debate.  Every tool has it’s purpose.  It is, however, nice to see a Linux desktop making yet another attempt into mainstream retail.   If anyone can put a Linux desktop in every home, Walmart can.  Applause for Wally and The Penguin!

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