Re: faketty-0.02 Bells!

[Helge H. <hel...@ai...>]

Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:

>What stops me from doing it: it would be a Debian
>Linux only shop and I am fearful of the crowd I see in
>Internet Cafes nowadays and the pervasive M$
>advertizing that equates a computer with M$ products.

Well, even M$ users use firefox these days.  They are open to
different software.  Debian has a nice GUI these days, you could
choose one of those window managers that are similiar to windows.
The biggest difference lies in installation and system maintenance,
but your users won't be doing that. :-)

I think a debian-based internet cafe would do fine, unless the
crowd's chief interest is windows-based games.  That's about the only
thing you can't do.  Internet browsing, including java&flash plugins works.
Word processing have several options, openoffice for the masses
and latex/lyx for the specially interested.  And you can even throw in
some linux-based games if you wish.


>A case in point: my old alma mater has about 100 PC's
>hooked up for its 1300 students. No attempt at all to
>go open source: each one has a M$ sticker that they
>paid their dues. You would think that an academic
>institution of higher learning would espouse some sort
>of critical attitude: zip.
>
>Nobody even ever tried an opensource solution for
>thesis.

Open source in academic institutions requires at least
one interested person inside.  But then it tends to
be easy to arrange.

><snip>
>
>--- Zoltan Boszormenyi <zb...@fr...> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>How about the Appian Xentera GT 8? It's a PCI card,
>>containing 4 Radeon 9000 cores, each can drive
>>2 monitors, so 8 monitors per card. They also
>>have AGP and PCIe models, too but only with two
>>cores,
>>called Xentera GT 4. So 1 AGP (two seats) and 5 PCI
>>(four seats) cards, 22 people in total, each one
>>can use dual monitor setup. :->
>>http://www.appian.com
>>
>>At this point I would be afraid of the PCI bandwidth
>>and not having King Arthur's round table... :-)
>>    
>>
>
>But yikes!!! those prices!
>I would be paying $340 for my g550 + 5 g450's.
>I'd be paying $2844 for the 22 people. But where would
>I find the room for the USB keyboards/mice?
>  
>
USB hub(s).  I believe USB supports over 200 devices connected.
Plug a hub into your USB, the hub has plenty of plugs for the
mice and keyboards.  Not enough? Plug another hub into the hub.
And powered hubs solves the problem of powering all those devices too.

>Wouldn't it be sweet to do a project like that some
>place, to find out what the real bottlenecks would be.
>Probably the PCI bandwidth like you say...
>  
>
Depends on what they do with those screens.  They don't eat
much bandwith as long as people only is looking.  Office/internet cafe
activities like mail, web, word processing and lightweight 2D games
is 95% idleness for the computer.  Scrolling and full-window dragging
may be done by the acceleration hardware so it don't
put much load on the pci bus.   3D gaming is a different story though.

There are motherboards
with several pci buses if bandwith becomes a limitation.  They cost,
but is way cheaper than 22 separate pc's.  And only one os
image to maintain. :-)

Helge Hafting