Church computers
Ut Oh we have a problem with the licenses!
A quick audit of the church and youth outreach centre computers revealed a disturbing fact,
we had seven computers, two of which acted as firewalls/gateways running Linux and the other
five ran Windows98/Me but we could not find any Windows98/Me licenses or Office97 licenses.
Working on buying five WinXP and five OfficeXP licenses showed we needed about US$ 2,000. This
was far too much for our humble budget.
Open Source Software to the rescue (for us and the bank account!)
Looking at the work of the machines I quickly realised that
four of the five machines were used 99% of the time for word/excel/internet explorer. All of these
functions can be performed by Linux machines with OpenOffice and
mozilla installed.
After evaluating a few distros we settled
on RedHat 8.0 with KDE 3.0 and
OpenOffice 1.0.1. The reason for this was mainly that I use RedHat at work and while we did try Mandrake and Lycoris the RedHat was just as user friendly and meant less work for me. Four of the machines were installed and a quick 10 line
instruction sheet given for users to follow. Most applications were placed in the toolbar for rapid location
by the users. It seemed most users didn't really notice they were not using Windows because they are so
used to the different desktops of 98/ME/XP and just considered KDE to be a different skin. The fifth
computer was installed with Chinese WinXP for compatibility with the mother Church accounting software. Again
OpenOffice was installed as the Office software. This is currently being evaluated and may be supplemented with
OfficeXP if needed. The total cost for making all five machines legal was US$ 150 for the single C WinXP
license. However we will be buying a copy of RedHat boxed as appreciation.
Problems/Notes/Impressions
I have to say that I am very impressed with how easy it is to use the KDE desktop, I certainly
expected more trouble than we had, some minor points are I wish that RedHat included: an mp3 player, flash plugin, java plugin, real player. Other than that it was plane sailing. Printing between Linux machines is very easy (we use CUPS) but we are still trying to print from LInux to the lj1100 on the WinXP machine. I guess it'll be figured out soon.
The gateway systems.
Each location has a single ADSL connection with dynamic IP addressing. To share this we installed a couple of P166 machines with RedHat 7.2 to act as IP Masq/gateway/firewall machines. Each machine runs a DHCPD server so that anyone can come to the building and plug into the network and get on the internet. This is actually an important feature as we often have visiting missionaries who wish to check email/print sermon notes etc etc. One of the machines has now been running for 13 months with no maintainence at all. All work reliably and most people are amazed they can just come and get to work without any configing of their computers.
Last update: Thu Dec 3 23:10:33 CST 2002
Comments to: jon _at_ sinica.edu.tw
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