Re: Cybercafe!

[Matt Provost <mprovost@termcap.net>]

On Feb 03 01:57 PM, Jeff Ross wrote:
> I'm in the early stages of a job setting up a cybercafe here in 
> Cheyenne, Wyoming, which, much to the amazement of many is not just off 
> the edge of the known world ;-)  This will be the first cybercafe in 
> Cheyenne and as such is sure to generate a ton of local press, 
> especially since this is a very popular coffeehouse, and it's owned by 
> someone that's in Cheyenne's tiny list of "movers and shakers."
> 
> I can get wiped Compaq Deskpro workstations (PII-400/~100MBram/big IDE 
> drive) from the state surplus store for next to nothing.  I quoted my 
> customer 3 of these units with 2 separate prices.  The first (and 
> lowest price) was an OpenBSD installation, complete with X11 and a KDE 
> desktop, using S/Key one time passwords to login.
> 
<snip>

I've been running X on my primary workstation at home for a couple
years. It's a Pentium Pro 180 with 128M of RAM, currently running
OpenBSD 3.4. X itself is tiny - Gnome and KDE are pigs. Try running a
lightweight window manager like blackbox and you'll see the difference.
I'm running the latest Opera with no problems.

Of course you can have KDE and Gnome installed and still use their
applications, which works well.

It sounds like this is an ideal setup for X-terminals. So basically you
would just run X on each desktop, connecting via XDM or GDM to an
X-server which can have some horsepower to run KDE etc. Then you just
install the apps once on the server. Almost anything can run a fast X
client.

(Yeah, I know I'm mixing up my X terms here - you actually run the
server on each workstation and the clients on the big fast server.)

Another option would be to use Knoppix or something like it. Then the
customers are pretty much unable to screw anything up. I imagine that
OpenBSD isn't far away from having something like that going anyway,
minus all the fancy hardware detection. Just come up with your basic
setup and burn it on a CD. Once you've got it perfected you can copy it
to the hard drive for speed but mount everything read only (just use a
local swap partition on the disk).

Good luck!
Matt