Originally I was running SunOS, a variant of BSD produced by Sun which ran on a type of processor called Sparc. When the .98 Linux kernel came out we cross compiled it, along with all the publicly available userland at the time, to run on a 386 machine. We found CPU speed per CPU speed a 3x faster Intel at the time did about as well as SunOS on Sparc and was MUCH cheaper. But then we compiled it on the Sparc and found it far outperformed SunOS so we installed on all of our Sparc processors except for one. Later 4.1 Redhat came out and we installed that, a lot easier than the week or so it took to self compile on the hardware available at the time. Then Centos 6.2 which had a nice Gnome-2 interface. I was disappointed to find they had totally ruined the interface on Centos7 but found Mate fixed that. Too much stuff was broken in Centos 8 to make it viable so we stayed with Centos 7 until end of life and then switched to a very early Ubuntu. I've stayed with Ubuntu until present but may switch to BSD or MxLinux or some other less Poettering destroyeyed Linux before then. Today I run quite a different number of distros for end user use but internally still all Ubuntu.

Shell Accounts
A shell is a command line interface for an operating system. With most shell providers, a command line interface on one flavor of Linux or Unix is all you get. Eskimo North provides access to eight different popular Linux distributions and SunOS Unix. Eskimo North also full remote desktop capabilities using X2Go with sound, and also NX, VNC, and RPD without sound.

Account Types
We offer four different levels of shell accounts: Economy, Standard, Power, and Enterprise. Background tasks such as IRC bots, Game Servers, and the like are permitted on all account types except student. IRC servers are not permitted because of their tendency to draw denial of service attacks. Standard, Power, Enterprise, and Super-Max shells include a MySQL database allowing you to run a variety of LAMP stack based applications on your website and to use non-web based applications that require a database.

Web Hosting
Web hosting under our domain is provided with all shell accounts. You can host your own domains with virtual domains or web hosting packages.

Remote Desktop
Remote desktop capability is like having a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers plugged right into our servers. Because our servers can be accessed anywhere in the world, this allows you to have a work environment you can access from anywhere in the world without risking losing your files to a laptop, tablet, or phone thief. We offer remote desktop capabilities on all of our shell servers except for the SunOS server. We support x2go, nx, vnc, and rdp protocols. X2go is the best choice as it provides extremely efficient compression and X round trip removal as well as sound.

Applications
Applications include Office Suites such as Libre Office and Caligra (which can read and write Microsoft Office file formats), Web and Program Development tools such as Bluefish Editor as well as many other editors, compilers, interpreters, scripting languages, debuggers, profilers, and online documentation.

E-mail
Our e-mail system offers unprecedented flexibility. You can access your mail via shell mail readers including graphical mailers like Thunderbird, or via Web mail, or via pop-3 and imap mail protocols, complete with TLS encryption. Our mail system includes Bayesian filtering with Spam Assassin which can be individually configured for your needs. Procmail allows you to sort and process mail automatically. Smartlist allows you to maintain mailing lists.

Security
Access to all of our servers is available via strong encryption. The shell servers all support ssh access. All of the remote desktop protocols tunnel via ssh. We maintain all of our servers up to date keep with the latest patches. Backups are made weekly.

Eskimo North has been providing Unix timeshare services since 1985. We have been providing Linux timeshare, shell access, web hosting, e-mail, and Internet services since 1992. Please take a look at our services as they support our free Federated services including Friendica, Hubzilla, Mastodon, Nextcloud, Pixelfed, and Yacy Search.