Terra Soft Acquired by Fixstars

Terra Soft Solutions, the company behind Yellow Dog Linux and the PowerStation PowerPC workstation (among other things) has been acquired by Fixstars Corporation from Japan, a company solely focused on the Cell/B.E. broadband engine. The entire product line and staff of Terra Soft Solutions will be maintained in Loveland, Colorado.

Terra Soft was founded in 1999, and was one of the top 5 Apple Value Added Resellers, and it was the only company who was allowed to sell Apple hardware with an operating system other than Apple’s own Mac OS. “Terra Soft started with my personal credit card and what in retrospect was an unlikely team to create a Linux distribution: a 17 year old sys admin, FileMaker Pro programmer, graphic designer, and marketing consultant,” Terra Soft’s CEO Kai Staats (now COO at Fixstars) reminices, “Dan, Troy, Jake and I threw ourselves into the challenge of building something which we were told (more than once) was impossible. Over one hundred Linux companies came and went, but we always pulled through.”

Starting 2006, Terra Soft started to work on the Cell processor, building the first Cell-based supercomputer together with several US national laboratories out of PlayStation 3s. Yellow Dog Linux became the first Linux distribution certified for Sony’s PS3 and the Cell processor in general.

Fixstars has promised to continue support for Yellow Dog Linux, which is certified for every piece of Cell-based hardware out there.

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