agger's Free Software blog

You can meet me this year at FOSDEM. I’ll be presenting a lightning talk about BibOS Admin, which is a ” web-based, easy to use admin system for Ubuntu” which we made in my company, Magenta.  The  subtitle of the talk is: “Because Landscape is too expensive”.

Here is the description of the talk on the FOSDEM page:

The public libraries in Denmark wanted an admin system for their new BibOS-system, which is an Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distribution for audience PCs. To achieve this, we built a completely new and completely free administration system for Debian-based PCs.

The public libraries in several Danish municipalities are in the process of switching their audience PCs from Windows to Ubuntu.

They needed a central administration system to manage it, and Canonical’s Landscape product was unacceptable for them; they needed the system to be completely free/open source, and Canonical’s licensing when running Landscape as software-as-a-service was too expensive. The available free alternatives are either too technical for library staff, or they don’t support Debian-based systems well.

In response, we created “BibOS Admin”, a completely new administration system for all Debian-like systems. It enables users to remotely manage, maintain and upgrade PCs and run arbitrary, centrally defined scripts on them. The system is designed to be easy to use for non-technical staff who can rely on a set of pre-defined scripts, which should be set up as part of the setup for each organization (source code available here: https://github.com/magenta-aps/bibos_admin).

In the talk, I will discuss the technical and organizational challenges of building a new management system from scratch in collaboration with Biblioteksstyrelsen and the public libraries in Aarhus and Silkeborg, who kindly funded the effort.