It has been a year since this server was set up and for its first birthday, we have changed a lot of things on it.

The Distribution

The server used to run Debian. This choice was made because of the lack of time to set it up, and because Debian is a well known and widely used distribution.

Unfortunately, Debian is really far from our philosophy. We don’t like automatic scripts configuring things “for us”. This is why we have switched to the ArchLinux distribution.

“Arch Linux, a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.” This is how the distribution presents itself and we do like this philosophy. Both of us are running this distribution as our main distribution for quite a while now. We are happy with it.

The Services

For end users, services didn’t change. Blogs, tracs, svns, repositories and ftp are still hosted by this server. But we decided to change the http server from the widely used Apache to Cherokee. This change led to both a drastic speed improvement on our server and a really lower memory footprint.

Final-user changes

These changes were all made to renew our commitment to communication. We want to share our ideas, our projects and our researches to the FOSS community.

Our first idea was to create a platform centralizing our FOSS oriented web services (Projects, researches and repositories) and our blogs.

This website now exists, it replaces our wordpress blogs with a built-from-scratch django-based website. You can now follow the evolution of our repository, blogs, projects and researches on this single website.

As we need some money to invest in more disk space, we added an ad-banner called AdBard. AdBard advertises only on FOSS related events/products/services, so it should not be annoying.

I would like to thank Denis for doing such a wonderful job in designing this website.