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Re: [LUG] linux in small business

 

Quoting Gordon Henderson <gordon+dcglug@xxxxxxxxxx>:

On Tue, 13 Oct 2009, Matthew Macdonald-Wallace wrote:

Quoting Gordon Henderson <gordon+dcglug@xxxxxxxxxx>:

And I also have the opportunity to tout Linux in a local project too - our town Information Centre is creating a museum and "Family History Room" with PCs/Internet access for public use and as the one who'll be managing it, I'm really tempted to buy commercial PCs with Win7 installed, and make them dual-boot with Linux the default OS. Then see how the punters get on. I'm not overly worried that I'm still contributing to the Redmond empire - the PCs I'm looking at are under £400 inc vat and the MS tax, although I will be recycling 1 or 2 older ones which already have XP licenses on.

Have you thought of using X2GO or LTSP instead? The server would probably cost about £800 and the clients can costs as little as 100EUR for two! I've found that if you set up Linux to look and feel like windows, most people don't realise the difference as long as they can watch youtube and listen to music (MP3s).

What server? (And why would I pay £800 for one when I can make one for £400?)

The people using these PCs will not be looking at youtube, nor
listening to mp3's, etc. (The PCs won't have speakers) They're their
for research - trawling through the census data, looking for family
members, local history, etc. And having watched people do this in the
past, we absolutely need the principle of least surprise. Turn a PC on,
find the web browser and off they'll go.

There won't be a central server here, just 3-4 PCs on a shared Internet
connection along with a networked printer. I've shown enough people my
xfce4 setup on my laptop to be happy to roll that out for them. It's
familiar enough for most people, and I can auto-reset (wipe/restore)
the user account on a logout/reboot, so no-ones going to get any
"surprises" when looking at browser history... We may offer user
accounts to allow some people to store some data, but in that case,
I'll just nomiate one of the PCs as a NIS master and NFS server.

I didn't realise the scale of this. You could quite easily run a 5 workstation LTSP suite that provides a web browser using an old P4 1.6GHz with 2G RAM and all the thin clients really need to be able to do is PXE-Boot (I've known projects use P3's with 256M RAM for this under XFCE!). The central server would also then provide centralise authentication including the ability to destroy account data on logout and the ability to lock the workstation down.

I'm advocating this because I've carried out a number of comparisons in the past between windows desktop clients and LTSP/X2GO Thin clients and the LTSP solution always seems to come out on top with regard to cost, efficiency and usability. YMMV.

Another almost local project is a customer of mine - a charity - who're
looking at a new database system for their shops, etc. I'm trying to
push them OS, but it would mean I'd have to write their database for
them - however I may throw it to the floor if I don't have the time -
there won't be much money in it though.. I'mm meeting them this week to
talk about it.

Have a look at some of the FLOSS software that's already out there such as Adempiere/Compiere, openbravo and ofbiz.apache.org - they may well do what you need them to already.

Yes, they might. But their application is nothing more than a simple
card-index style database with a bit of schedulling and booking for
driver pick-ups and deliverys, php/mysql/apache will be fine for a bit
of work to create it all. They already have a Linux server - which is
bit old admittedly, but I'm trying to get them to use a hosted solution
(for multi-site access) - they have 5 sites and although I'm building a
VPN over all sites, putting the database remote would be a sensible
thing for them in this case.

I know that OpenBravo, Compiere and Adempiere can be used over a VPN remotely because I've set them up in the past to do just that. Personally I'm a big fan of using stuff that's out there before I have top spend time writing my own, although again I'm not really in a position to judge if it's appropriate here! :)

Cheers,

M.

--
Matthew Macdonald-Wallace
matthew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.truthisfreedom.org.uk/

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