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HELP with the new access model

If you were previously a regular user of our public terminals, you will notice several things different on this new model. We hope you will take the time to explore this new system and discover some of the advantages that came with the change to offset some of the things that no longer work like they used to.

The Bad News

First off, these are the changes that could be considered bad:

• For most intents and purposes, DOS and Windows programs will no longer run on these machines since they no longer run a Microsoft Operating System. Several projects show great promise to help this problem in the near future, but as of now only MS-DOS applications can be made to run with any reliability and those have no sound. Therefore I didn't bother configuring DOSEMU Also see the related help topic on Installing Software
• Real Audio is installed but is currently broken on the Gateway machines because of the oddball sound cards installed having compatibility issues which haven't been solved yet. However, MP3, WAV and MID files do work.

The Good News

And these are some of the benefits we gained in exchange for the above problems

• No more seperate adult and student computers. This means you will no longer be forced to wait for a turn while there are still empty seats in the wrong section.
• In the DeRidder branch (coming soon) you can login with your email name and password and have a personalized experience. If you bookmark a website it will still be bookmarked next week when you return. If a website sets a cookie to let you avoid logging in each time this will also be saved with no fear of other patrons gaining access to your account. You can also setup Netscape's Email client to handle your mail, save file attachments, etc. Basically, any of the terminals becomes your computer when you sit down in front of it.
• If you happen to be one of the few people of the Macintosh persuasion you will especially like the fact that you can bring your floppies in and read them on our new machines.

The reasons why we made the changes

Previously we were providing patron access using Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on the main floor and we had Windows NT 4.0 in the Gates Lab. Both had both problems and advantages.

Windows 3.11 was getting 'long in the tooth' as many new programs simply were no longer being released for it. It's good points were almost zero maintenence (due to disk imaging software we cooked up) and being almost completely open for people to download and install software, save files, etc.

Windows NT on the other hand was a different animal completely. Our imaging tricks wouldn't work on it without some extensive research & development investment so our other choice was the Gates Library Foundation security model they were shipped with. While it was a low maintaince solution, it achieved it at the expense of locking everything down so completely that it dramatically reduced usability. Also, as we were preparing for opening branches in remote parts of the parish the lack of any viable method of remote administration was a real concern.

Our solution was to migrate everything over to Redhat Linux. It has the benefits of very high stability, easy remote administration, no threats of obsolesence, low cost and very good security right out of the box with little customization needed. It's drawbacks are less currently available software and the unavoidable fact that it IS different from what users might have used before. These drawbacks were were not as serious as the drawbacks of the alternatives. However the main reason was the ability to remove the distinction between the adult and student computers and have one pool with filtering distinguished by your login. Since the branches will only have one public computer, at least for awhile, filtering access for adults or forbidding most students from using the machines were never considered as realistic choices.

User logins also give the ability to allow saving bookmarks, cookies, documents, etc. Standardizing on a single Operating System for both servers (our servers have been running Linux since we first connected the library to the Internet) and workstations also reduced the workload on us in the IT dept.

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