«
»

Pre-conference: Open Source Installfest: Day 2

October 28th, 2006 by Christina Hennessey

Day 2 of the pre-conference was presented by Amy Begg De Groff and Luis Salazar of Howard Country Library (Md.). Amy and her IT staff of six (which includes Luis) have successfully switched their 279 public computers over to the “Groovix” operating system (www.groovix.com). Groovix is based on Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions.

Reasons for switching the public computers from Windows-based to Unix-based:

  • cost. Amy only had a small budget for IT for the year. Buying new computers and new/upgraded Windows licenses was going to cost $250,000. Groovix is much cheaper and can be run on much older computers (instead of throwing out those old computers, they could continue to be in use).
  • security. The security problems with Windows and Internet Explorer are well-known.
  • capable staff. Amy has an exceptional team of programmers and computer experts on her staff that were up to the challenge. Two of the staff (Luis and Michael Ricksecker) had previously created their own version of Linux named “LuMix” that has been well received in the Linux community, and was used in the library for two years before the Groovix rollout.

    • Upper management was in support of the change, and the Groovix solution was completely deployed in September 2006. You can read the library’s press release about the change here: http://www.hclibrary.org/about/press_release.php?id=7.

    Amy & Luis handed out bootable CDs to all attendees at the session so we could see Groovix in action. I would venture to guess that most average computer users could not tell the difference between this interface and the Windows interface; it looks that similar. Instead of Internet Explorer, the browser of choice is Firefox, but Opera is also available for those few sites (including Standard & Poor’s) that do not work well under Firefox. Instead of Microsoft Office, the OpenOffice products are available on these computers. Instead of AIM, Yahoo, or other IM products, GAIM is offered.

    Regular library staff have not been completely in support of the change. Staff training on the new systems was mandatory, and was tailored to show staff exactly how to fix the top tech support problems they had reported in the past. This Groovix FAQ was created for staff and public alike: http://www.hclibrary.org/training/GroovixFAQ.htm. There is also an online staff bulletin board where staff can post technical questions and answers about the new systems.

    Howard County Library is really doing inventive, cost-saving, clever things with computers at their library. If you are even considering doing anything like this at your library, I recommend that you contact Amy at degroffa@hclibrary.org. She is so enthusiastic about this project, and you will find her energy and ideas contagious and inspiring!

    This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 2:32 pm and is filed under LITA Forum 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    Leave a Reply