we (BibLibre) are investigating openkiosk (http://openkiosk.sourceforge.net/)
I've worked with OpenKiosk, and I thought I'd let you know about my experiences, which was just over a year ago. First, the Windows client for OpenKiosk is not Open Source. It is compiled with a closed-source qt to windows api library. Despite the fact that the Windows client is closed source software, they continue to host the demo download for it on Sourceforge, which I believe is a violation of Sourceforge's terms of service. Second, OpenKiosk is essentially a one man band. At the time I was first working with it, the developer had decided to stop updating it. It appears that he is working on it again, but who knows if it will continue to be an active project. Third, it just didn't work will. There were a number of major bugs that made it impossible to use. The primary one being that when the counter hit 0, instead of logging off, it would give them thousands of minutes more! So I gave up on OpenKiosk. The second kiosk system I found was outkafe, which is a fork of the now dead zybacafe project. It actually worked correctly. It was written in an uncommon language ( I can't remember atm ), making changes very difficult, however it works by having the server and client communicate through a postgresql database. The first thing I did was rewrite the time counting daemon, which didn't work well. Second, I wrote a web-based front end to replace the admin program which wouldn't run well on our thin-clients for some reason. Then, when I wanted to change the client, I rewrote that to. At this point, I had no actual code from outkafe left, so I christened my trio as libki and put it on sourceforge. I'm still the sole developer, but I'm always looking for a few good men ; ) The best part is I've already integrated with Koha, so that part is done! However, it you decide to work with OpenKiosk, please let us know how it turns out. Kyle http://www.kylehall.info Information Technology Crawford County Federated Library System ( http://www.ccfls.org ) On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:21 AM, paul POULAIN <paul.poulain@biblibre.com> wrote:
Nicole Engard a écrit :
I recently became aware of Pre-Book from Userful: http://userful.com/products/pre-book
It's open source and I'm wondering if anyone is using it with Koha? I haven't seen it in action yet.
we looked at this tool last week, and pls note that clicking on "free download" results in : http://userful.com/sorry :(
also note the technical architecture seems strange : you must install the server part on a specific server (or virtual machine) : http://support.userful.com/wiki/index.php/Manuals/Pre-Book_Administrator_Gui...
-- Paul POULAIN http://www.biblibre.com Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08
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