Standing on the IP remnants of the failed Open Country Linux systems management start-up, an outfit called LinMin came out of stealth mode the other day offering a dirt cheap, reportedly commercial-grade way of provisioning Linux on bare metal.

LinMin has abjured any direct sales force in favor of web-based distribution at prices practically anyone can put on their credit card: $100 a year for 10 client systems, $400 for 100 and $750 for 250. Perpetual licenses run $250, $1,000 and $1,875 respectively. There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee,

CEO Laurent Gharda says alternatives run $10,000-$200,000 and demand not only a business case be made but take months to implement. LBMP is supposed to make minutes.

The beta LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning (LBMP) also includes an alpha release of Windows Server provisioning for mixed environments.

LinMin says it can natively install and configure a standard Linux image and customer-selected applications as well as capture and restore disk snapshots for disaster recovery on blades, servers, PCs, appliances and virtual machines.

It uses one of an account's servers as a provisioning appliance and a PostgreSQL database for storing configurations, the file system to store files, kernels, packages, snapshots and scripts and a Firefox/PHP-based UI with a built-in web server for configuration.

It supports some of the newest versions of some 20 Linux sub-species, including Red Hat, CentOS, SUSE, Asianux, Fedora, Debian and Mandriva. Ubuntu is promised.

LinMin says LBMP, which runs on CentOS 5.1, makes hardware and software testing and QA labs more cost-effective by virtue of rapid repurposing and reduced labor costs.