FOSS based Cyber Cafe

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Contents

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Case 1: Migration from Windows to FOSS

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Migration processes

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Software requirements

  • Web Browser: A fast and secure web browser that can parse majority of the websites. Mozilla, Firefox, Konqueror are candidates. Konqueror is able to understand a lot, if not all, of the IE specific scripting. yes, but konq doesnt do javascript and ajax.
  • Chat: Chat applications that can support one time logins, i.e. there should be no need to save account information into the computer to be able to use it. No FOSS chat application fulfills this criterion. It is however possible to customize an application to support it.
  • Document Processing: Applications that can understand proprietary office formats (doc, ppt, xls) and convert between them and open formats. OpenOffice.org fits the bill. We can encourage cafe users to save their files as cool looking PDF files instead of word formats by showing them benefits of the same (read-only, machine independence, etc.). Koffice is much faster and easier to use than OOo.
  • Cafe Management Software: Software to manage access to terminals in the cafe.
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Typical Hardware

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Case 2: For a New Cyber Cafe

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Software Recommendations

Linux distribution:

About - This powerful tool allows administrators to create profiles for groups of users, for example Programmers or Admin Staff and set certain default and mandatory settings for these groups.


For cafe administration :

  • Pessulus

From its about - enables the system administrator to set mandatory settings in GConf, which apply to all users, restricting what they can do, which may be of particular usefulness for kiosks (internet cafes, for example).
Note : This tool has lot of missing features, yet worthwile.

If its KDE then

About : A Point&Click tool for system administrators to enable KDE's KIOSK features or otherwise preconfigure KDE for groups of users.

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Recommended Hardware

  • For Assembled computers

This will list hardware that are known to work Out-of-the-box with most of the popular Linux distributions. One should note that the hardware listed here, wouldn't have even miniscule problem for working.

  1. Motherboards
    1. Intel Motherboards
  2. Processors
    1. Intel / AMD - 32 bit
  • For pre-assembled and brands
  1. <brand name 1>
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Topology

One may deploy the cafe network in the following two ways:

  • Independent systems in a network:

Each system on the network is is self sufficient in terms of processing power, memory and disk space. This will decentralize the system to a great extent, but also increase costs and administration overhead.

  • Powerful server and cheap X clients:

One or two powerful systems will host X servers. The clients may be diskless and can boot off network or Live CD to connect to these server systems. This reduces cost and also eases administration of the systems. Performance is obviously lower than an independent system, but still good enough.

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Case 3: Benefits of migrating to FOSS (Linux)

  1. Cost Savings
  2. Get rid of viruses
  3. Freedom to redistribute
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Case 4: Setting up a demo cyber cafe using FOSS

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Avenues 

* Doing it all ourselves
* Making a foss section in an existing cybercafe with subsidy from us
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Costs from scratch

can someone fill in the approx costs for this? 

* Rent
* Furnishing
* Machines
* staff
* break even volume
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Foss section in existing cybercafe

This looks good if we can get a guinea pig. Could be small, say 2-4 machines and we could go to town putting in features. What would the subsidy be like?

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