On Sun, Jan 17, 2010, Steven Benmosh wrote: > For a number of years I had the idea of opening an Internet Cafe based on > Linux. That is, a small number of computers for access to the internet, > email and teleconferencing, but using Linux. Maybe each computer with a > different OS (Suse/Fedors-CentOS/Ubuntu/etc. and with etc. I mean other > popular or complete systems, maybe Mandriva etc. >.. > Could you tell me why this idea would fail miserably, and lose a lot of time > and money?
You need to consider who your clientelle would be. Go to a typical Internet Cafe and look at the people sitting there. Who are they? Do they look to you the type of people that would actually care if one computer has Suse and another one Fedora, rather than all of them having Windows (for example). I think your idea is good if a Linux-based Internet Cafe will be cheaper to build than a Windows-based one. I am guessing this is probably true, because you won't have to pay for licenses for Windows or any other software, and you can probably (with quite a bit of work, though) get along with weaker and/or fewer hardware than you'll need for Windows machines. But personally (and maybe I'm just pessimistic here) I doubt many people will come to your Internet Cafe just because it runs Linux. I, for one, will not stop using the (Linux) computers I have at home and at work and start sitting in an Internet Cafe, just because I want to support Linux :-) When I visited Internet Cafes (exclusively while abroad on vacation, with no Internet connection...), I can't say I even paid attention to what OS they were running. I think most of them looked like some heavily-customized version of Windows, but basically I just cared that the "Browser" icon and a maybe a couple of other things worked. I did not (obviously) expect to program on them, to install new packages, to do things on the command line, and so on, so the question of whether it was running Windows or Linux really makes very little practical difference, except perhaps for the warm and fuzzy feeling I'd get if I noticed that they were running Linux. That being said, the equation works both ways: If users don't care which OS you're using, they also won't mind that you use Linux instead of Windows. > You can begin with the fact that (at least for me), Skype and Gmail video > chat do not work on window, but - and I am serious - I want to hear the > devil advocacy this group is so good at. Actually, Skype video *does* work on Linux! I never tried Gmail video chat, so I can't comment on that. A bigger problem, especially in Israel, is all those @!...@#$ IE-only sites. I don't know why, but there is an epidemic in Israel of sites that don't work properly (if at all) on Firefox or any other free browser, and only work on Internet Explorer. Though this problem has been with us for more than a decade and doesn't seem to go away, there are signs now that it may be starting to go away - as Firefox, iPhone, and the likes are getting more popular. But it is still a long way from going away. So do yourself a favor, and try to find a way to legally run IE on Wine - or something similar - in your Internet Cafe :( -- Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Jan 17 2010, 2 Shevat 5770 n...@math.technion.ac.il |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |The message above is just this http://nadav.harel.org.il |signature's way of propagating itself. _______________________________________________ Discussions mailing list Discussions@hamakor.org.il http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discussions
