Open Source Links


Open Source Software Reading


Open Source OSes:

Ubuntu Linux Canonical's Linux; designed for both laptops & desktops, as well as servers ubuntu.com
Linux Mint Desktop-focused Improvement on Ubuntu - designed for laptops & desktops https://www.linuxmint.com/
Debian GNU/Linux multipurpose distribution, of which many other Linux versions are based. APT package management system. debian.org
FreeBSD robust OS adapted for many hardware platforms - often used in network servers freebsd.org
NetBSD multi-platform BSD-based OS noted for its portability netbsd.org
OpenBSD BSD-based OS noted for its security openbsd.org
Fedora Linux RPM-based general purpose Linux distribution, sponsored by Red Hat fedoraproject.org
CentOS free Linux distribution based on and binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise. centos.org
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Subscription-based($) Certifiable Linux distribution often used in industry www.redhat.com/rhel/

Open Source Projects:

Apache open-source HTTP server www.apache.org
nginx newer, better open-source HTTP server than Apache https://www.nginx.com/
Blowfish, Twofish Free, strong encryption algorithms from Bruce Schneier www.counterpane.com/blowfish.html https://www.schneier.com/academic/twofish/
ISC Internet Systems Consortium, home of DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and BIND 9 (open source DNS implementation) www.isc.org
GNOME An open source desktop environment for UNIX-like systems. www.gnome.org
Nautilus File management environment for GNOME https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus, https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Nautilus
Xiph.org Open source codecs, such as FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Theora, Opus, Speex, CELT, etc www.xiph.org
PHP Hypertext preprocessor. www.php.net
Python An interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language www.python.org
OpenStack Open Source cloud computing platform, mostly deployed as IAAS (Infrastructure-as-a-service) in both public and private clouds openstack.org
rysnc Very fast file mirroring. rsync.samba.org/rsync/features.html
Samba SMB and CIFS client and server for unix and other OSes. http://www.samba.org
SSL (OpenSSL) cryptography toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) network protocols. www.openssl.org
JSP Java Server Pages; platform-independent XML-like tags and scriptlets written in the Java programming language. java.sun.com/products/jsp
Enhydra A "leading Open Source Java/XML application server" and a "comprehensive Web application development and deployment environment." www.enhydra.org
Tomcat (Jakarta) Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet 2.2 and JavaServer Pages 1.1 Technologies http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/index.html
Tinydns -a small, fast, reliable Domain Name Server http://tinydns.org/
Zimbra Open-Source Turn-key eMail server software - VM-ready! We host it! www.zimbra.com
Vinum Vinum is a BSD block device driver, implementing the RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-5 models https://sourceforge.net/projects/vinum/
Zope dynamic content development system and manager https://www.zope.org
Plone Object-oriented acquisition-based CMS based on Zope and Python https://www.plone.com

2026 Additions: What We Deploy Today

OpenZFSthe filesystem behind every eRacks NAS: pooling, checksums, snapshots, self-healingopenzfs.org
Proxmox VEopen-source virtualization platform (KVM + containers) we preinstall on requestproxmox.com
TrueNASopen-source NAS operating system, a popular choice on our storage linestruenas.com
Podmandaemonless open-source containers, our container runtime of choicepodman.io
Ollamarun large language models locally, part of our preinstalled AI stackollama.com
Open WebUIbrowser interface for local AI models, preinstalled on our AI serversopenwebui.com
vLLMhigh-throughput LLM serving engine for production AI workloadsvllm.ai
llama.cpplightweight LLM inference in C/C++, runs models on modest hardwaregithub.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp

See also our free guides: Choosing a ZFS Layout and the Private AI Sizing Guide, plus machine-readable knowledge at llms.txt.