Network PC's

[Michael Huber]

On Mon, 27 Jan 1997, Millard Johnson wrote:

> PORTALS has had 2 years of successful experience loading
> NETBSD UNIX operating system and Xwindows software onto
> [...]

> The network PC at about $700 (plus monitor) without hardrive, Novel
> network, even a fan to break, would seem to be a great solution for
> a public Internet terminal.  It would have substantially lower
> purchase and very low maintenance.  Has any library investigated the
> network PC for public Internet access?

We (Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery at the University of Maryland
Baltimore County) have been trialing four N|C's from IDEA.  Our
current costs are 2 * $650.00 in a buy one get one free deal.  I am
using a P90 with 24 Megs running FreeBSD as the server.  

After considerable effort (they should have been plug-and-play), I
have the things running to some degree.  They don't always start on
the first try, requiring a reboot, and they seem to crash when
accessing certain web pages, although I have not explored this to
great detail.  

I am also not thrilled with there browser but, I could just be to used
to Netscape.  The browser does not display most pages in the best
light and things like tables are more than a bit on the ugly side.

At what should be $500.00 a box when 'released' plus a monitor
(1024x768x???) they are not all that cheap in my opinion and I can't
say that what I expect to save in maintainence costs.  I am also
rather fond of my PAWS running IronClad, all I have had to do to then
in the six months since I put seven of then out for public use is to
replace a few corrupted files on one of the machines.  I did run
scandisk on all of them before the Christmas break though.

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|  The thoughts and ideas expressed above are mine and mine alone.  |
|  Michael Huber                                  mhuber1 at umbc.edu  |
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