CAOS is maintained and managed by a team of computer science experts with numerous proven skills. With resources pooled together they created a multifunctional operating system with mission critical dependability. CAOS Linux is designed to run on all x86_64 and i386 based hardware ranging from clusters and servers to production level appliances to personal desktops and laptops. Scientific research labs, public agencies, ISP's, private enterprise, virtualization and cloud computing ventures will find CAOS Linux to be an integral component to their operation. Supporting a wide variety of software, CAOS Linux is based on the best aspects of GNU/Linux and has full binary compatibility with the most popular enterprise distribution of Linux.

The CAOS Linux installer would be found easy to use by both an experienced admin or a Linux newcomer. Users can either have a fully automated install (including HD partitioning) or they can take full control from the install prompt. The automated CAOS Linux installer, Cinch, is a very user friendly, written from scratch and open to use by other distributions. Your CAOS system has the advantage of grabbing the latest packages from our online repository during installation, guaranteeing your system is up to date. Post-installation configuration is simple through either Sidekick, our server administration Swiss Army Knife, manually, or via the web using an industry compatible webmin tool.

We have heard one administrator suggest that CAOS Linux was a "super hero cape" because it enabled a big job to be accomplished fast. Your experience too with CAOS Linux will give you an appreciation for its efficiency and power.

The CAOS Vision

The CAOS Linux Project was first initated because of the need for an openly managed, RPM based version of Linux. CAOS NSA (Node, Server, Appliance) pursues the "sweet spot" concept for a Linux distribution, which has the following characteristics:

• Offers a balance of bleeding edge package versions and stability
• Has a long life, offering updates for more than 3 years
• Always be freely available and distributable
• Managed and maintained openly by the community itself
• Utilizes known standards in the industry
• A general purpose distribution, working for many solutions

CAOS NSA focuses on being a lightweight, fast, efficient, stable, and secure distribution of Linux that is appropriate for servers, compute nodes, network appliances, and even the latest desktop and laptop computers. Because CAOS focuses on High-Performance Computing, we have the benefit of tuning our system at a massive scale. Small incremental performance regressions may not seem like much or even be noticeable on a single machine, but when run at a large scale with tightly coupled parallel processing jobs, those slight regressions collimate into a very noticeable performance drop. Since our target development is for HPC and performance for systems of large scale, we exercise extreme care in the prevention and elimination of such performance regressions. Thus, when our system is multiplied to a massive scale, you have an OS that is fast, clean, and stable. Our focus on large scale system performance benefits all of our users because the optimizations that bring speed and stability to a 50,000 node cluster also bring speed and stability to a single server. Our development practices assure that you are getting the best OS for the job with CAOS NSA no matter the scale of your deployment.

CAOS Linux will continue to grow and become more popular. As this happens, we will gain more developers, contributions, and Infiscale will make more support partners. This will make the CAOS Project and Infiscale more successful and grow financially, which will enable us to develop infrastructure and fund developer salaries. With a full time development staff we will be able to spend more time developing even stronger software. That will in turn help us grow further, and thus complete the cycle.