ITWales.com

Welsh company buys The Linux Emporium

By Basheera Khan

The Linux Emporium, an online distributor which has been supplying the UK and beyond with cheap Linux CDs for six years, has been taken over by a Welsh Linux consultancy, ChyGwyn.

Dr Steven Whitehouse Recently relocated from Oxfordshire to Swansea's Digital Technium, ChyGwyn is headed up by Dr Steven Whitehouse, who says the decision to buy The Linux Emporium was spurred by the desire to add another string to the ChyGwyn bow while at the same time retaining a website which over the years has become something of an institution in the Linux community.

ChyGwyn was established in 1999 as a Linux consultancy and to provide related development services. Though it has several large clients, the consultancy side of the business was adversely affected by the technology sector decline in recent years.

Adding a retail element to the business ensures a steady stream of incomes, says Dr Whitehouse, and moving to Swansea brings ChyGwyn closer to one of its joint venture partners, Caerderus, a Linux and Internet consultancy based in Swansea University's Innovation Centre.

At the moment, the Linux Emporium is focussed on selling box sets of Linux software - the company sells all the main distributions of the operating system and some of the more obscure ones as well. In the latter case, it manufactures its own CDs, making the information fairly cheaply available, and sparing its customers from having to download the various components themselves.

"There are one or two other strange things that we happen to sell, aside from the software, and I'm hoping to develop this part of the business more in the future. For example, we sell Happy Hacking keyboards, which are basically miniature keyboards, very small, with full size keys on them. They do away with all the other keys that people very rarely use and they're a very popular item."

The company has plans to expand the range of goods available from the Linux Emporium to include more hardware and books. Dr Whitehouse expects the CD-burning aspect of the business will also receive a boost, thanks to a business development grant which will defray the cost of investing in new hardware. This level of support is yet another reason he says he's happier doing business in Wales.

"I was quite amazed; back in Oxfordshire, if you go looking for grants, basically there aren't any and nobody wants to know. Down here, I've had people ring me up and say, by the way, can I come and talk to you about this grant we're offering? That would never happen back there."

Once ChyGwyn is more settled, Dr Whitehouse says, the next step will be to develop the support services it can offer to business users of open source software, through joining the partnership programmes of Linux software distributors such as Red Hat and SuSE.

"We've got the retail side and the consultancy side, which is very much aimed at the in-depth kernel programming, but we don't have much in the middle, which is a bit of a weakness at the moment. And that's something we'll be looking at in the future."

Contacts

ChyGwyn
Tel: 01792 513 737
E-mail: info@chygwyn.com
Web: http://www.chygwyn.com



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