Is it true that although VA has some key Debian developers, and even
that for a while it seemed as if they are going to ship their system with
Debian, they actually ship some versions of RH?
> On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Ronen Engler wrote:
>
> > Hi all, I was looking at the www.valinux.com and it seems to be
> > interesting, just want to know if someone bought something from them
> > or maybe someone will tell me not to do such a thing... i need to
> > make a real servers... and it seems they got everything "build-in"
> >
> > someone?!?
>
> I adore the company! they are a great choice... (but I'm biased)
>
> (warning, rambling of a fan from here on, with some history for the
> interested)
>
> VA-Research (they only renamed to VA-Linux a few months back) was born
> circa 93-94, when Larry Augustin was still doing his doctorate at
> Stanford and working for a small EDA copany. this is before the days EDA
> and NT ever met, and many strugling Silicon Valley startup had troubles
> affording both the very expensive software licenses as well as the Unix
> workstations. Larry was playing with linux and sugested to his boss to
> make a port to it. after convincing him that it was almost just a
> question of running "make" on one more platform, he proceded to offer it
> to customers. but we are talking here about early Linux kernels that
> supported nothing... Larry started builiding a few machines as a side
> job for customers, only with hardware he knew was supported and sold
> them preinstalled. he is assumed to be the first one to ever do so. He
> would build them, hack the kernel when needed to make a tighter fit for
> the customer and give the support only hardcore fans give :)
>
> when the demand got high and his Doctorate was finished, the demand was
> high enough to quit his job and try to make it into a company. a few
> dozens of computers a month got him at 98 to about 200 computers a month
> and a 12-13 worker office. Ever-concentrating on the community, Larry
> struck a friendly agreement with his ISP neighbouring office and got a
> 100BaseTX connection across the wall to a hub connected by two T3s to
> the backbone, and started hosting Debian, Freshmeat and a few other
> central projects, he hired more kernel hackers, so he could provide
> clients with the best support for the SCSI cards he sold and so on. at
> that point I have a tiny connection too, Rob Walker (sysadmin there)
> needed someone to share the load with, and since we knew eachother from
> SVLUG he offered me the job. I really was interested, even though it was
> half the paycheck I got at the time from my employer, just because of
> the people who worked there. Alas my Visa didn't permit it and I was not
> able to be employee number 15...
>
> about 13 months passed. the hopes and low paychecks payed back afterall.
> the Linux big-bang came, VA linux got investments from SGI, Intel and a
> few more sources, were commisioned by Intel to do the port of Linux to
> Itanium (which ran a beowulf cluster of SGI machines at SuperComputing
> 99 only 8 weeks after first silicon!) and went on to have a record
> breaking IPO on the NASDAQ. with 250 employees and growing, they now
> supply hardware to Etoys, Akamai(!!), Deja.com and many more
> high-profile, high-availability big hit companies, and ofcourse many
> smaller ones too.
>
> but the most important thing is that they haven't lost their sole. it's
> a wonderful core of people working there, many of them I knew from SVLUG
> long before they went to work there, and it shows it's a company that
> rose from the community, and now giving back as much as it can!
>
> http://www.valinux.com/community/
>
>
>
>
> --
> Ira Abramov ; whois:IA58 ; www.scso.com ; all around Linux enthusiast
> "I don't know why, but first C programs tend to look a lot worse than
> first programs in any other language (maybe except for fortran, but then
> I suspect all fortran programs look like `firsts')"
> (By Olaf Kirch)
>
>
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