Re: [RLUG] NV Sate Fair

[Dennis Bagley]

As to what they are going to need....

Again I am waiting to hear if they are getting some hardware from the county
and what kind of hardware it will be.  If it's a mess of old IBM P-Is, 
then my first
step will be to ask who on the board owns a boat and has need of an anchor.

That being said, I got the impression we stand a chance of having 
P-III's to work with
that may need a bit of a RAM upgrade.
(If anyone else knows of  other sources for a "matched" set of 
equipment, like Sierra Pacific,
 IGT, one of  casinos etc. please let us know.  If we have an excess of 
equipment, that is NOT
 a bad problem to have.)

From the conversations I've had so far, I am less concerned with Samba 
and Windoze
interoperability than the ability to create certain types of files that 
can be read on a BillyBox;
ie. spreadsheets and doc files, and of course PDF. 

So OpenOffice will cover most of that.  One of the accounting packages I 
will be examining
is browser and sql based, but  external use is not as important as 
general suitability.  And I seem to
recall a package that will create PDF files.  Any body remember what it is?

Going with Gnome sounds just fine.  KDE does have a few nice GUI tools, 
but there are
Gnome substitutes for virtually all of them.

I have my first official meeting with the finance committee on 1/15 and 
will have visited the physical facilities
beforehand.  Next week I have a consulting job in Wisconsin but will be 
in touch via email. and cell phone.

Request to Jay or whoever else knows where to dig out the info.  Please 
look up the ownership/admin
on www.nevadastatefair.org.  I was told it is not actually owned by the 
fair!  May need to try to correct
that.

Dennis

Jay MacDonald wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Bill
Cunningham
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 11:46 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [RLUG] NV Sate Fair


Jay,

I agree with you with the Debian thing - I only suggested
Mandrake as they have recently pledged support for years to
come. However the hardware support in Debian is not up to
par with those in other distros. I think we probably should
take stock in what they need as opposed to proposing
solutions for solutions sake. I'm of the simple approach is
the best.
Perhaps finding out what they really need would be the
first step in determining what distro to use. What hardware
do they currently need to have supported and what hardware
do they intend to purchase within the next year?
After that then we probably should start to look into what
the really need in terms of financial reporting and such.
One step at a time.
   

I absolutely agree. We should organize a group to meet with them and
determine specifics of what they will be doing. Dennis? What's your take on
that? I know you've had some indication.
Jay

 

- Bill

--- Jay MacDonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
   

Everyone,

I don't want to make this a distro war, but one thing not
to lose sight of
is future availability. I've recently moved away from Red
Hat to Debian
specifically because of this, and am not planning to look
back (read: I'm
really pleased with Debian). With the recent purchase of
SUSE by Novell I,
for one, would not put money on SUSE/Novell not going the
way of Red Hat.
Bottom line: the more "open" we can make this the better.
This project needs
to be sustainable.
LTSP would be an ideal solution assuming the resources
were available for
the central server. IMHO running it with more than a
couple of clients on
anything less than a 1 GHz PIII with 1 GB RAM would be
foolish. Until the
resources are there to put such a system (or better) in
as the server, I
recommend we abandon LTSP as a possibility. From what
I've seen so far, no
"big servers" are coming our way.
IMHO GNOME and KDE are the only real options for the GUI
on desktops, so a
minimum system requirement needs to be defined. Sure,
they would run on
lesser hardware, but we need some level of productivity
and ease of use in
this install. As such I absolutely agree that anything
less than a PIII with
256 MB RAM is not worth pursuing for the desktops. If
lesser hardware is all
that is available by donations we need to try and get the
RAM upped.
If a couple of PIIs are available then by all means bring
them in as low end
servers handling routing, e-mail, file and print sharing.
They will likely
continue to have some Windows machines around so Samba,
rather than NFS,
would IMHO be the most likely direction to go for network
sharing. Tunneling
Samba through ssh is much easier than NFS, too. (As an
aside, my friend here
in Colorado uses ssh to tunnel port 139 from the home
offices to the Samba
server at the main office and runs Quickbooks on shared
files through it. He
has a shell script to set up the tunnel in a CygWin shell
using OpenSSH).
As for applications, I think it's pretty much obvious:
OpenOffice.org and
Mozilla make up the basis for the bulk of the requirement
outside of
accounting, especially since they both cross over to the
Windows world. My
experience with Evolution (in a GNOME environment) has
been outstanding,
although it's not cross platform (plus since Ximian's
purchase by Novell I'm
also leery of it for a recommendation). I would
definitely NOT recommend
going to any of the K tools. The users WILL need to share
files and
experiences with Windows users, and the K tools are not
conducive to this.
I'm not familiar with the various accounting packages
available beyond
GnuCash, so I won't bring an opinion to the table on that
aside from try to
keep it to an ASP type interface (i.e. it works in a
browser). If the best
tool for the job is an X app we need to make sure any
Windows users that do
show up have an easy install for CygWin and XFree86 to
run it from a server
(although we once again run into LTSP type issues in that
case).
This is a great opportunity for RLUG. Thank you Dennis
for bringing it to
the table. If properly managed we could probably get an
article in Linux
Journal or something. With that in mind I suggest someone
take the ball and
run with organizing the project and starting a SIG or
something; what's the
new constitution say about this?
Cheers!

Jay (struggling with a Windows box and Outlook while on
vacation in CO)
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Behalf Of C.
Richard Matson
Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2003 8:52 PM
To: Bill Cunningham; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [RLUG] RE: RLUG digest, Vol 1 #286 - 7 msgs
On Tue December 30 2003 3:03 pm, Bill Cunningham wrote:
     

Hey,

The KDE version shipping with the latest Mandrake is
       

scaled
     

down and simplified for the end user. During install it
specifically asks if the user is new to the desktop
environment and adjusts the menus accordingly. Might be
worth looking into.
$$$$$$$This sounds like the bestidea . Rich
--- Dennis Bagley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
       

Because of the "level" of users at the Fair office,
         

we
     

are expecting that a
full GUI under X-windows
would be simplest (probably KDE or GNOME.)  The
accounting software
products being considered
are Quasar, SQL Ledger and Lazy Eight Ledger.  Office
suite will be Open
Office due to it's compatibility
with M$ products and probably the Mozilla suite or
Evolution for browser
and email, though that's still open.
Based on a few things I looked at, maybe the Ximian
desktop should be
considered, though I would like to hear
from anybody who has actually used it in a corporate
environment.
I have some concerns that P-II's may not be fully up
         

to
     

the tasks under the
latest kernel,
if for no other reason than we need to keep support
requirements as low as
possible and
speed high.
Of course some of you may have another view.  Perhaps
creating a really
beefy server
then running all the other nodes as thin clients
         

would
     

enable using P-II's.

But remember the end users are:
    A. New to Linux (most have never even seen it
before)
    B. In some cases not even regular users of PCs
    C. Probably older than, shall we say, the median
         

age
     

of the RLUG
membership.
            with substantially less computer
         

experience,
     

of any kind.
    D. Will want their hands held, for at least a
         

little
     

while.
    E. There will NOT be an in-house computer geek
         

on
     

staff.

At 01:04 PM 12/30/2003, Johnny Lau wrote:
         

Hi, Everyone,

Is it matter if it is PII?  Only if it is ok then I
           

will
     

check with my boss,

         

may be we can donate some computer as well.

Please let me know

Johnny Lau
PC-Doctor, Inc.
Customer Relationship Manager
Tel: 775-336-4021    Fax: 775-336-4099
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Address: 9805 Double R Blvd. Suite 301
Reno, Nevada 89521
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
           

[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
     

=== message truncated ===

=====
William Cunningham
Cell: (775) 813-6892
http://cunndev.netfirms.com
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Find out what made the Top Yahoo! Searches of 2003
http://search.yahoo.com/top2003
_______________________________________________
RLUG mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
   

_______________________________________________
RLUG mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
 



_______________________________________________
RLUG mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug