GBdirect: Leaders in Linux Training and Deployment

We believe that GBdirect is the leading Linux training company in Britain and Europe. We were, for example, amongst the world's first commercial Linux trainers (well before some of the best-known Linux distribution vendors) and we are thoroughly steeped in its practical application.

Expertise and Experience in Linux and Unix

Our Linux trainers have been using the OS since its first stable kernel release (1.0) in 1994. That's hardly surprising given that they include people like Mike Banahan (a pioneer in the technical development and commercial deployment of Unix from the 1970s onward).

In 1997, after a long period of testing and evaluation, we knew and trusted the OS well enough to commit our entire head office infrastructure to Linux. Now there is barely a non-Linux machine in the building and some of our staff have never worked on anything else.

Enterprise Class Experience

When companies hire our Linux trainers they are not merely buying years of Linux experience, they are also buying decades of experience in Unix teaching and consultancy with some of the world's largest and most valuable corporations.

Philosophy: Teach the Fundamentals

Our consulting experience has taught us that advanced Linux use is almost invariably about applying the fundamentals well, rather than about merely acquiring globs of "advanced" (i.e. esoteric) knowledge.

That's why all of our Linux courses are built around the common principles which apply to all Linux distributions and which apply to almost all the tools or applications they contain.

We do teach application specific or distribution specific topics, and we have developed many highly specialised bespoke Linux courses for our customers. What distinguishes us, however, is the effort we devote to explaining those specifics in terms of the generic Unix principles they implement.

In short, we aim to ensure that our students acquire transferable skills along with expert knowledge.

Philosophy: Linux Implements Unix/POSIX Standards

In all of the past years’ Linux hype, countless journalists failed to notice that Linux is Unix in all but legal title and that differences between most flavours of Unix and Linux are trivial (at least in comparison with the fundamental differences between versions of MS Windows).

All modern Unixes operate in fundamentally the same way, because they all implement the same set of international standards (‘Single Unix’ and POSIX) governing the interaction of applications and hardware. Everything Unices do is built on these standards and Linux implements them more consistently than many. That's one of the reasons why Linux could be so easily ported to virtually every hardware platform available.

A fundamental understanding of Linux not only provides a good grounding in Unix it also encourages platform independent skills in general computing, e.g. in system administration, programming, network management, security, etc. Because it is open and standards based, Linux bares the system's internals to its administrator and can only be managed well by those who understand underlying computing principles. We aim to develop that kind of understanding.

Linux public courses schedule