pichel’s blog

GNU/Linux at the public library !

At the beginning of the month I was called by the Community Council to provide them with an estimate for taking three “old” computers and installing them to the public library of the council. A great opportunity to make the public in touch with GNU/Linux and Free Software… so said my estimate that was approved.

Now I’m about to ship 2 of the 3 machines, not that old at all (Dell Dimension 4600 with 2,4 GHZ PIV inside and 512 Mb RAM !), that will run perfectly under Gnome (and could certainly do the same with KDE… if only I was a KDE addict :-), the third beeing desesperately out of order. One will go in an office, the other will serve as public access to Internet and also to the library’s database via a web connection.

I had some investigations to do in order to get a reproductible and enough locked public machine. I first thought about sabayon, but be in Debian or Ubuntu the package is desesperately broken at this time. The good news about this is that I’m currently learning python so I’ll certainly be able to fix the problem for the next century release (yes I’m slow at learning). So I fell back into GnomeConf and Pessulus for the locking of the Desktop, a cool Firefox extension called Public Fox to get an acceptable result. Last touch was to prepare the menus, put a cool wallpaper claiming for Free Software, and other minor adjustments. The reproductibility of the setting is done by a rsync on the home folder that I just rsync back after a brand new installation, and a good package list got by dpkg –get/set-selections.As a result it’s nos that automatised, but good enough for my needs : the next computer will be setup in an hour.

I’m glad that in the next weeks, the best computer to browse the Web at the library will run on GNU/Linux with only two non-free software : the flash plug-in, and google earth. Those are here to present a computer that will be able to show off, and will not give the feeling that Free OSes aren’t able to browse on Utube that could be falsely interpretated that they cut you from parts of the Web and Internet experience.

Let’s now wait for the next machines that will forcibly come since I still haven’t managed to get the council switch to GNU/Linux… so they’re still buying new machines to be able to follow up the “new” versions of their software. If it’s bad on one side, it’s still good on the other beacause they are forced to give away better computers every day 🙂

Tags: free software, public computer, vercors

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 02:01 and is filed under Free Software Advocacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.