Hello

In the US, library is an important place for students and even elders
to borrow books,videos, surf the internet because all of these are free.

Some libraries have woken up by the problems they are facing with
Windows systems and have implemented Linux.

Here is a news story.

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_=
gci968183,00.html

I have copied some useful paragraphs here:

McNair said the library had considered a Windows turnkey reservation
system on Dell computers that, according to Open-PC's estimates, would
have cost them roughly $1,200 a seat, not counting anticipated Windows
licensing and upgrade fees. "We had a big budget cutback and that went
out the window," McNair said. The cost of comparable thin clients is
about $450 per seat, not including monitors.

While $1,200 a seat might not sound like an incredible expenditure for
an enterprise, for a public library it is virtually unthinkable. Paul
Ballantine, President and CEO of Open-PC, explained that in addition
to having a tiny IT budget, most public libraries are understaffed.

With limited resources, the library had to get resourceful. Using its
existing machines rather than buying new ones, the library turned its
old PCs -- 400 and 700 MHz Pentium boxes -- into thin clients by
switching their hard drives with bootable ROM drives.

The thin clients (both the new boxes and the converted PCs) are
connected to a central terminal server running K12LTSP, with mirrored
drives for reliability. K12LTSP is based on Red Hat Linux and the
Linux Terminal Server Project, and it was designed for educational use.

Despite being a kind of beta site for Open PC, the library's
transition was surprisingly smooth. "There were a few bugs they were
working through, but for the most part it went fairly well," McNair
said. "The public went from Windows to Linux and surprisingly, there
weren't very many problems with that."

Library patrons were able to adapt to using OpenOffice, instead of
Microsoft Office, very quickly. McNair said, "They sort of miss the
templates" Microsoft Office provides for resumes and other documents.
However, library staff has been able to create new templates for their
patrons and save them in OpenOffice.

And the system is still running fine. McNair and OpenPC's Paul
Ballantine concur that both the staff and the patrons are happy using
Linux. The library is working to iron out issues such as floppy disk
access for its patrons.

McNair advised that other organizations looking to migrate to Linux
and/or thin clients should be sure to plan ahead with care to avoid
surprises. "I thought I had spelled out exactly what we needed… some
things had to be tacked on," he said.

Curl said Open-PC had to add some network switches to hook things up,
along with some portable Sony USB diskette drives. The library also
bought a scanner and a copy of PowerTerm, a proprietary terminal
emulator program, for use at the circulation desk.

"Spell out in glaring detail what it is you need to do; look ahead a
year from now. Do it right the first time," McNair said.