Today I met with the Chairmen of the Board of Directors of the Humber Merchant Seamans Welfare Association. I gave him an update as to how the Project was progressing. I explained such things as managers are interested in, such as how long the computers would last, how much he would need to pay and worry about legally in terms of liciences, along with how much longer the Cybercafe was going to be available (uptime) and how easy and cheap it would be to maintain.
I also explained to him that "deadlines" in open source projects are entirely a non-technical concept. Although we now have a billable cybercafe system, it still has issues regarding usability (pendrives/cd access), charging for laptops (we currently "hire" ethernet wires to connect to a hub and have turned wireless off!). Providing these issues are resolved, I am sure it will be adopted across the Seamans missions around the country....and word of Puppy Linux will travel the seven seas.
The meeting was held at the Hull Cybercafe (currently 100% XP, talked about with pics
here). One of my tasks for today was to show them the system that was in use in Immingham. I heard that they were still experiencing a lot of downtime and securiy problems, so I decided to give them the option of booting Puppy linux on every Computer in the centre, sans billing system.
I had prepared some CD's with much help from several people the previous night/that morning that I had hoped would have been able to boot in any one of the computers, that would automatically netboot any of the other computers on the network...this way effectively Linuxing the entire cybercafe in about 20 minutes.
Unfortunately these hadnt burnt correctly and would not work on any of the CD drives there! (I must stop getting my CD's from the £1 shop). Instead of that, I employed a bit of creative thinking, of how to get this done. In the accountants office there is a second computer used exclusively for internet browsing/email (the accountancy PC is Running XP, and is therefore not compatible with the Internet so it has no connection
).
1 I installed
Seekers Puppy Linux installer for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP.
2 I then replaced the pup_421.sfs file that it installed with the pup_421.sfs I use for the cybercafe.
3. Once I had this booting, and it had been booted to create a pup_save.2fs file, I installed the modified tftp netboot server package I created from MagicZaurus's package (
here). Into this I put a copy of the netboot initrd.gz and vmlinuz files from the Immingham cybercafe.
4. As the other PC's had an "F12 Network Service Boot" option when the HP Bios Screen came up upon poweron, the instructions to the staff consisted of "Press F12 for Puppy Linux when there is a big "HP" on the screen. It will make the computer work again."
In total it took about two hours to provide Linux to all 15 computers at the Hull centre, instead of 20 minutes. It would probably have taken two days with Windoze XP
This has given me an idea for refining the system in use at the cybercafe to make it an All-Puppy affair, which will make it a lot more flexible, and will be quicker and easier to set up. It would also mean that the Billing system would be puppy linux based, and hopefully I can make good then on
this offer of £150 for its creation.
"Squid" funnily enough, sounds like the way to go...
Im really happy that the system has reached this level of completeness, it certainly would never have been possible without the goodwill and voluntary assistance and expertise of a great many people. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed.
Puppy Linux's [url=http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=296352#296352]Mission[/url]
Sorry, my server is down atm!