Replies

Three tools that I’ve found to be very helpful are Driverpacks, WSUS Offline[/U], and Ninite. I keep the first two updated and burned onto DVD-RW’s, and the last, its installer set up with each clients software, set to run every night. (That way, all of their Ninite-installed software is always <24 hours out of date.)

Granted, Microsoft has a well-deserved reputation for business practices completely unfettered by ethics (or law), but saying that they are ‘putting public libraries at risk’ is a headline that I would more usually associate with Gizmodo… or Fox News. To be honest, I’m unaware of any libraries that have updated their public computers to Vista let alone W7, nor are intending to at any point in the near future. (Barring new computer purchases, of course) Heck, if you slap XPGnome onto a Linux distro like Ubuntu, then toss in IE4Linux and run MS Office/Works/etc. with Wine, you will have a secure, stable, easy-to-use system that will cover over 90% of the activities of a typical library kiosk. If you want to go even farther, you can use LTSP to use all of those old computers stacked in the back to run XP on Pentium 1’s! Haven’t heard of it before? Check out some success stories and see for yourself what can be done. Need more terminals/thin clients? Easy; just get something like this, this, or this, or simply put an ad in the paper asking for donations of old computers.

Going with LTSP just make sense for the bottom line: no license fees ever, no need to upgrade any hardware except the server, you can still run better than 90% of Windows software to boot, and one single command totally updates the operating system, drivers, and applications in one shot, while another will upgrade the OS itself to the latest version! What’s the catch? To save time and a lot of headaches, you should have a Linux guru on site to set it all up, then to remote in later to fix any problems, older hardware tends to use more power, and the library staff should learn some of the differences between Windows and Linux. That’s it. Really.

Thnik about it!
DeadlyDad