Eighteen Years of GarfNet

1995-08-18 to 2013-08-18

Editors note: quite a lot of this article is obsolete. The site has changed quite a lot since 2013!

GarfNet is penguin-powered and full of unixy goodness! Yep! we’re “open source” and enjoying every moment of it. GNU/Linux is serving us so well that there is hardly a whiff of the mighty Micro$oft on this site these days. Just penguins and of course, a goose!

If you haven’t been here for a while, then there are some shiny new things to look at. Firstly there is our new and improved internet radio tuner, linking you to some of the best British, European & World radio stations http://www.garfnet.org.uk/tuner. Secondly there is a new section charting earthquakes http://www.garfnet.org.uk/earthquake. There are loads of other tweaks & fixes too. So make yourself a cup of tea, or pour a nice cold beer and have a good look round.

Open source is fantastic! It means we can develop and deploy all manner of goodies that would cost a fortune if we tried to do it using proprietary software. These are some interesting places to visit here at Garfnet…

• GarfNet Pictures+Media – based on the legendary Coppermine image database system. There’s loads of new stuff over there.

• And that lazy old Goose now has his very own Blog, running on the excellent WordPress blog manager. Just don’t take anything he says too seriously! He is a goose after all!
• And there are some cool toys in the tools section, if you like that sort of thing!

This part of GarfNet is powered by an amazing CMS (Content Management System) called Joomla. Derived from the old Mambo CMS – and written by the same group of developers – apparently Joomla means “together” in Swahili. Please click here to learn more and how you can use it on your site, for FREE!

GarfNet is still undergoing some engineering works at the moment. (Isn’t it always!) You may find that some links in the new site still take you back to the old site. This is intentional while we transfer the content. The GarfNet “Home” link will always take you back here. Meantime, you can visit our sister site DEOSS. DEOSS now hosts the old GarfNet Moodle distance learning environment as well as dozens of other open source-based projects.

• http://www.deoss.com

And if you need to contact us then please visit our contact page.

Best wishes, Garf.

GarfNet is a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server. It runs Debian GNU/Linux v5 operating system and Apache webserver v2.4. The back-end database is mySQL v5.5 and it is coded using PHP5.6 programming language.