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Linux-based Internet Cafe

MeatProduct

Dear All,

There is a strong possibility that I will be setting up an internet cafe. At the core of the cafe will be gaming. Counter Strike, BattleField 1942 and the like. I am very much in favour of having Linux on all the machines and using WineX for the gaming. The reason for posting here is that I would like your thoughts on the feasibility of doing this as opposed to using windows.

Are there significant cost savings? (a bit obvious but bear in mind that a license must be bought for WineX @ $99 per license + $60 per license per year for updates)

Will the public complain about not having windows in the cafe?

Will it turn people away?

Would it get support from the Linux community (if the Linux community got support from the internet cafe of course)?

These are my main concerns but there are many other smaller issues that I'll leave out for the moment.

Many thanks for any advice you can give me.

Nick

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Typedef

Shut up or go away.

MeatProduct

Hi Echomadman,

Sorry for the delay. My cat was killed by a car today so I haven't been online much today.

The internet cafe will be in the south of the country. Can't pin it down anymore than that though I'm afraid.

Thanks for the staffing advice, that's the biggest cost involved and if that goes up by a lot then there's hardly any point in opening up in the first place. I'm aiming for 2 members of staff at all times as a minimum. I'll be there at peak times also.

Thank you indeed,

Nick

Capt'n Midnight

Originally posted by echomadman
you can do both, but its not an exact science, formatting *always* goes awry.

Abiword is a much better replacement for Word imo, but still not 100%

Then again tables usually go to mush when exchanging between word 97 and word 2000..

No openoffice does not do everything that word/excel/powerpoint can do. But since most users don't use 90% of the freatures and each build is better than the last. Really unless you have complex legacy documents it should do what you want - just remember to change the default "save as" file types to microsoft.

The_Conductor

FAT 16?

Red Alert

Linux is easier to lock down and also you have the option of using something like BpBatch to re-image the hard disks at every bootup. It also works on win 98 but won't do NTFS systems like Win2k and XP.

EDIT: You could do a linux setup with a Windows 2000 Server for Word, or use Cross over office from www.codeweavers.com. It works perfectly and allows you to install and run office 97, 2000 and XP.

MeatProduct

Originally posted by sovtek
Meat,
I'm an admin at a large cafe in Dublin.
I've often considered moving to Linux as well.
We used to do webhosting and mail accounts so we have some Linux servers around.
The problem I see with it is mainly Word (and being unfamiliar with OpenOffice I'm not sure if you can edit a Word doc in OpenOffice or not) and gamers.
Unlike some have suggested their are plenty of gamers. While many Irish gamers might be getting their own computers and connections...there are many Romanians and Chinese who do use internet cafe's for gaming.
Unfortunetly the owners aren't bothered about gamers so i'd move in a second if the Word problem weren't a factor.

Hi Sovtek,

Many thanks for posting here. As you said, Word is probably the biggest problem. I will more than likely run MS Office via Crossover on a few machines for those customers that really want to use Word. It's a big issue, I'm treating it as such but I don't think it's enough to hold me back from going with Linux.
I had no idea there was a Romanian and Chinese market in Dublin. There might be a similiar situation in the south (to a far lesser degree of course).
That's a pity about the owners not being bothered by gamers because from mwhat I hear there is still a market in Dublin for a really good gaming venue.

Thanks for your thoughts,

Nick

PS: If this goes ahead you are all invited to the opening party. Just don't come planning to use Word;)

MeatProduct

Captain, just found that option in Open Office myself yesterday, about changing the default save as. That's a god send really.

Red Alert, thank you for mentioning BpBatch, that's a bit of software I expect I will be using rather a lot.

Nick

Typedef

Originally posted by smccarrick
FAT 16?

Is that like supposed to format joke: ?

MeatProduct

Typedef,

For a benchmark I can really only go with what is said on the forums on the Transgaming sites. I would like to do trials on WineX, it might save me a lot of hassle in the long run. I'll be looking into that next week. Unfortunately Transgaming aren't willing to give me a deal on 20 WineX licenses, $99 upfront and $60 per year for updates.

Nick

Emboss

flamegrill

I Shant hand out any warnings, I'll close the thread and ban you all.

Play nice.

Paul

MeatProduct

I have noted the names of everyone who has contributed to this thread and will be sending invitations for the launch party to you all, should this internet cafe ever get off the ground. I hope this discussion can continue in a civil manner.

Many thanks for all your contributions so far,

Nick

PS: Bring your own OS to the party

nadir

woo souds great.

ssh

I'm the sysadmin for more than one cafe in the city centre. We ran Linux on a few machines for a while before I started there. People didn't use them, and would prefer to wait until a windows machine became free. The same applies to the macs, unfortunately.

We have openoffice on the PCs. For the most part, it's fine. If it didn't display an OpenOffice Logo when it opened up and it saved in Word 2000 format by default, I'd say most people wouldn't notice. Sadly, they do as it is.

As has been demonstrated by some cafes, if you can keep the cost per hour sufficiently low, people will be fairly flexible in terms of what they use.

Finally, make sure your staff can bridge the gap between user and Linux. Like really. That's probably the most important thing here.

EDIT: Also, battlefield ran like a pig under winex last time I checked. It was quite stable though.

Typedef

I'd almost lean towards having something like Mandrake, with all other Window Managers cut out and maybe even with familiar icons placed in the quickstart bar, so that average idot (x) could click on an icon he/she recognised as being the 'internet' icon and have a browser appear.

Which browser and the underlying OS, shouldnt' make a huge difference.

So basically you place an ie6 icon on the desktop and quick start bar of each client, it's just the icon mind, since the box runs Linux and the browser that gets execv()'d is probably something like Mozilla or Firefox.

This way your typical client still gets to navigate the with a familar look'n'feel, while you get to run your OS of choice.

I'd say that would bridge the knowledge gap for alot of users that ssh was just speaking about.

Essentially you'd want to devote quite a bit of time to making the desktop as intuitive as possibe to your average Windows monkey.

There is some sort of Window Manager for X, which aims to totally replicate the look'n'feel of an Xp desktop.

Certainly, that wouldn't be a bad starting point.

MeatProduct

Thank you ssh and Typedef,

As said it is an important point that the staff are capable enough. It is something I will take great care of when interviewing the staff.

It's a pity that people didn't really take to Linux in your cafe, that is of some concern to me. Although, as Typedef said, this can be somewhat minimized by using familiar icons and possibly an XP theme, although I haven't come across a really good XP theme yet.

Thank you,

Nick

Capt'n Midnight

Originally posted by Typedef
Is that like supposed to format joke: ?

Must have meant FAT32
hey but FAT12 is always good for a laugh..

How about a few KVM switches - cheap barebones system is cheaper than a good digital LDC monitor.

- or running thin clients - only if the policy is block people installing stuff on the PC's
Windows 2000K server for internet explorer - 'course you can't save anything unless you share the local drive and use a different login for each pc
Is there a TS client for Linux (there is for citrix but that is a tad more expensive)

maxheadroom

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
Is there a TS client for Linux (there is for citrix but that is a tad more expensive)

There is - here's an article about it (two parts):

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7418
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7419

The project is at http://www.ltsp.org

ssh

I remember looking into that a while back.

There's an internet cafe addon for it here:

http://akinimod.sourceforge.net/icafe.html

which is an incredibly cost effective way of expanding a cafe with low cost terminals. Pretty nice. Not for us though...

pickarooney

On the IE issue, has anyone ever used a tabbed browser and not loved it? I've had numerous computer-illiterate people sit down at my computer and ask where was internet. Once I showed them the icon there were never any further questions.
Well there may have been some questions but I couldn't hear them through the screams as they ran down the street in fear.. :P

I installed an XP theme in KDE once for a laugh. It looked just like XP and wasn't much of a laugh come to think of it.

Screenshot here if you're interested.

sceptre

That's nice pickarooney:D

The XP setup on my laptop looks just like OSX.

I'm not too sure whether it would be a factor at all but running a net cafe almost totally on Linux might let some of that cushy corporate training stuff pass you by. Given that you've not mentioned this as part of the market you're aiming for I may just be flopping a red herring on the desk though. In any case, Crossover Office would allow you to have this one on the go as well.

MeatProduct

Thanks very much for all those comments. I've seen that XP theme and it looks good, just the transparency issue needs to be sorted with it.

The training is a good point. It is something that will be used as a source of income. If I go for Linux I really, really want to avoid any Microsoft licensing. Of course that's gonna be pretty bloody hard to do if we're gearing towards the corporate market. It's likely to be the middle-aged home user that we will be aiming our training at. Just the basics; internet browsing and the like, stuff that is fairly common between platforms.

Many thanks,

Nick

ColmOT [MSFT]

I have to admit that I'm impressed with this...

http://www.xpde.com/

Typedef

That's the link I was talking about.

Totally, run that wm, and your users by and large won't, know, the difference.

pickarooney

One thing that I think nobody has mentioned is the number of websites that simply can't be viewed (or display very badly) in non-MS browsers. I don't know if anyone here has done an in-depth comparison but there are quite a lot of no-go areas (badly-written html pages if you prefer) for Mozilla, Opera etc.

mneylon

Originally posted by pickarooney
One thing that I think nobody has mentioned is the number of websites that simply can't be viewed (or display very badly) in non-MS browsers. I don't know if anyone here has done an in-depth comparison but there are quite a lot of no-go areas (badly-written html pages if you prefer) for Mozilla, Opera etc.

That's simply bad coding/design..

echomadman

That's simply bad coding/design..

thats simply pointing out the obvious without offering a solution

I mentioned it in the other thread on this in technology, Apparantly Meatproduct doesnt see it as a major problem,

Most MSN related sites will be missing a lot of functionality though.

the chat-monkeys will be your biggest problem imo though.

ssh

Well gaim does all of the protocols very nicely. It just doesn't do anything fancy like webcams or chat.

Typedef

Doesn't gnome-meeting do something like that?

theciscokid

yup, does it quite well

1.0 has big improvements over .98

has the member database also for looking up profiles etc..