[vox-outreach] Article: 'Linux in action: A public library's success story'

[Jonathan Stickel]

Richard Crawford wrote:
> Jonathan Stickel said:
> 
> 
>>Why build Linux from scratch, or use some low-profile distribution?
>>Bill has shown it to be possible to build a secure kiosk with Debian,
>>and I'm sure gentoo would fit the bill as well.
> 
> 
> I was under the impression that LuMiX *is* a low-profile distribution,
> which the authors pretty much customized for library use.  I honestly
> don't know what the difference would be, though, between LuMiX and a kiosk
> install of Debian/Gentoo.  Would Deb/Gen allow for a working installation
> of OpenOffice.org so that users could do word processing and so on?
> 
I personally use gentoo, and yes OO.o is in "portage" (the name for 
gentoo's install system and dependency tree).

In case you didn't know, gentoo is an "install from source" 
distribution.  This means that you can have a lot of flexibility in how 
and what is installed.  Also, the latest versions of software are 
available very quickly.  But you wouldn't want to maintain several 
individual installations across an organization, like a library.  It 
would just take to darn long to do the initial installations and all the 
upgrades.  However, it is possible and very feasible to build all the 
software on one machine and distribute to the others.

Jonathan