Release Day
After 16 months of development, numerous test versions and countless fixed bugs, yesterday was a big day for the Linux development team at OM’s IT department – we finally built the release version 1.6 of our Linux distribution that we refer to as OMSLS (OM Standard Linux Server). Now our offices around the world can update their office servers with new features, fixes and other improvements (enhanced support of group policies, SSL based VPN, webmail, etc.) and hopefully won’t run into any obvious bugs, even though it took us until the last day of our “release window” to get the last minor issues ironed out.
If you wonder why you’ve never heard about OMSLS or where you can find a copy of it, don’t. It’s currently not available to the public, but only for internal use within our organisation. If you wonder how that’s possible, read the terms of the GPL and you will see that as long as we only use it internally and don’t distribute it, that’s ok. But… we do want to give back to the Linux community and have already taken steps to make sure this will happen in the not too distant future. First, we need to do a major cleanup of the code, though. We’ll toss out the old, bash/perl/sed/awk/whatever-based administration program that still uses dialog for its “UI” and replace it with a new, shiny one written from scratch in Python. Once the API of that new framework has been stabilized, we can think about stripping out some of the internal modules that the rest of the world doesn’t need and turning the rest loose on the world. My guess is that it will be another year before we really find the time to do that… the next internal release (OMSLS 2.0) is clearly a priority.
Some facts about OMSLS: based on CentOS 4.2 (a recompiled version of the source RPMs to an enterprise Linux distribution by a major North American Linux vendor), optimized for use on text-based consoles (thus allowing dialup emergency maintenance even in countries with bad phone lines), pre-configured for Samba, printing support (including a PDF printer), secure email supporting SMTP, UUCP over ssh, POP3(s), IMAP(s) and webmail, protection against viruses and spam, OpenVPN, quota support on a per-user and per-department basis, dialup internet support for small offices and much more that I can’t think of right now. When I first saw it about 4.5 years ago (I was still working for an ISP at the time), I thought that it was the kind of system I had always dreamt of as a small intranet server for our customers. Since then it has grown to be even better. You may want to come back here occasionally to find out when and where the first public version will be available.
Add comment February 1st, 2006