Open Source Software - Examples

Valley Technology have been using Open Source Software in a commercial environment for over ten years. There are many applications available that we have proven to be every bit the equal of proprietary alternatives. Following is just a small selection of some of the packages we have deployed.

Operating Systems

Linux

The freely available Open Source operating system Linux has been used by staff at Valley Technology since 1995. Rather than building our own distribution, we use the excellent SuSE Linux, though we started out years ago with Slackware and have also deployed Gentoo.

In addition to being very robust, the fact that the source code of all the packages supplied in the distribution is available means that it is far easier to diagnose and fix any problems.

The name "Linux" refers to the operating system kernel, and provides a framework for other applications to run. IT staff generally work from "Linux Distributions" which include the Linux kernel, and many Open Source applications on a single DVD, all wrapped up with an installation program. Many of the basic applications (such as C++ compilers) come from the GNU Project.

Desktops

KDE

We use the K Desktop Environment as our graphical desktop environment. It is highly customisable for individual users, or can be locked down so that users conform to a corporate look and feel.

Office Software

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a free Office suite of programs including: a Word Processor which can read and write Microsoft Word .doc files, a spreadsheet which can read and write Microsoft Excel .xls spreadsheets, and a presentation system which can read and write Microsoft Powerpoint .pwt files. There is also a drawing package and a database system.

Network Services

Samba

Samba is used to connect Microsoft Widows PCs to Linux servers in mixed-mode networks. In addition to providing shared network drives and printers to Windows PCs, Samba can be used by Linux machines to connect to shared resources on Microsoft servers.

Web Servers

Apache

The world's most commonly used webserver is Apache. In addition to being very scalable, and featuring many plug-in services such as Jakarta (the server-side Java solution), it also hosts the popular PHP server-side scripting language.

Databases

MySQL

The MySQL databasing system is a robust SQL-compliant way to store data. In addition to being an enterprise-class database for normal use, due to it's Open Source nature, MySQL is used on many websites as the backend database, giving rise to the term L.A.M.P. (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a highly scalable, SQL compliant, open source object-relational database management system.