melonman's Journal: Cybercafe goes to Redhat 8

This week was network upgrade time. We reformatted our server that had been running RH7.3 and installed RH8. In the process, we also changed browsers and office suite.

It all went a lot more smoothly than last time, mainly I think because we knew what the potential problems were this time around, and we were serving customers within 3 working hours of putting in the CDs.

Things I like about the new setup:

• RH8 looks a lot nicer than any other version of Linux I have seen. I guess it looks more like Windows, but then that doesn't upset our customers too much.
• We found the rpm for getting embedded Acroread within Gecko browsers, which is going to save us a lot of messing around.
• We upgraded from ccmsn to amsn, which seems to work somewhat better and look a lot more like the M$ version
• We now have a browser running in French.
• We finally set up a system to clean up user accounts after each login, which means no more porn on the desktop and no more saved passwords (or, once, credit card details)
• Java 1.4.1 seems to work a lot better than whatever I had before, especially for chat clients.

Things I am less impressed with:

• Phoenix, which I generally find to be wonderful, blows up consistently on the French Yellow Pages site, which meant I ended up installing Galeon instead.
• Galeon seems to seg fault if people click more than once on the icon bar icon, which of course all Windows users do
• Open Office seems to die permanently if you double click, and the only solution I have found is to delete the .openoffice directory, which is not exactly convenient. I'm going to write a short wrapper script to detect double clicks...
• The cp command doesn't seem to work as advertised in man!!! Force doesn't, and it doesn't seem to copy dot files. I ended up writing my own copy routine in Perl...

Still, on balance, I think we have a better system than we had before, and the punters seem to like it, which is what pays the bills :-)