The shoulders of giants

I've been in the privileged position over the last 2 months to see the company that I work for go from strength to strength. The company is of course Impi Linux (http://www.impilinux.co.za) and the majority shareholder is Mark Shuttleworth. The idea behind Impi is to create derivatives of Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com) for business and government.

Ubuntu is a fantastic Linux distribution, do yourself a favor and try the latest preview of the upcoming version 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). It is truly terrific and its getting rave reviews already (http://www.osnews.com/story.php/17505/Ubuntu-Feisty-Fawn-Desktop-Linux-Matured), Feisty Fawn demonstrates what the potential of a mature Linux distribution is.

Ubuntu aims primarily at the desktop and its audience is a global one. This means that although the offering is very mature and has most if not all of the features that a user would need, it does not cater out-of-the-box for the enterprise. That is where Impi comes in.

With Impi Linux we have the advantage and privilege of standing on the shoulders of giants, we take the solid base that Ubuntu offers us and we add what our customers require to deploy it in the business environment. To give you an idea of what this means, these are the features that we focus our attention on:

1. Single-Sign On (Kerberos, Password Management)
2. Directory Enabled clients and servers (based on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server)
3. Groupware (based on Kolab/http://www.kolab.org)

And much, much more...

When a business looks at Impi they get the advantage of a great product, due to its Ubuntu heritage, but they also get those features that are critical to their day to day operation and productivity.

From high up here it sure looks promising for the Linux desktop and server.