[Koha] Considering Kaho

[Chris Nighswonger]

Hi Rich,

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 11:23 PM, Rich Bright <rbright at missvalley.com> wrote:
> I'm working with a public library in a midwestern US town of 6000
> people with about 125 library users per day. We have had SirsiDynix
> Unicorn and iBistro for 7+ years.  It has simple become too expensive
> to continue with Sirsi and their service has declined as the price
> has increased over the years.  We have looked at Evergreen and Kaho
> in several site visits and we think Koha would be a great replacement.

Welcome to the Koha community! You're in good company as many others
have successfully replaced SirsiDynix systems with Koha.

>
> I have extensive IT experience (20+ years) in the Windows world in
> both software development and system administration.  I have used
> Macs a great deal over the years and I have used Linux, but not
> seriously managed Linux systems.
>

*nix administration is not super-hard to learn, you'll just have to
invest time and patience into it. The returns are great, however.

> Admin would be easier for us on Windows, but lack of current version
> support and perceived Z.3950 issues appear to make this a bad choice.
>

I'm running the 3.2Alpha2 version on my XP box at home. So it is
possible. However, I would not recommend it for a production system at
present. Although fairly straightforward at present, the installation
is not for the faint of heart or novitiate. And while functionality
(including Zebra) seem solid, there appear to be at least some apache
performance issues at the moment. There may be other issues which
would need to be addressed as well. Since Win32 support is not paid
development, it will probably be a long time in coming up to
production status (if it ever does).

> We are considering running Koha on a new Intel based Mac-Mini.  Any
> good or bad experiences here.  I read a tutorial which makes it look
> very workable.  At one time there was a Z.3950 problem but I think
> that went away in 3.x  Is that true?  I think we need to stay on
> MySQL v4.1 also.  Still true?  This looks like a good option.

AFAIK there are no z3950 problems at present.

I think most newer installs are running over v5.x

>
> Assuming we run it on Linux, what is the preferred distro?  Would a
> 2.6 GHz Pentium 4 based Dell 2650 likely be up to the task?  What
> suggestions would you have for disk partitions?

Koha is developed on Debian (and Ubuntu). So one of those is the
recommended distros. However, plenty of folks have Koha running over
other distros as well.

Search the list archives for hardware specs as well as setup
recommendations. This has been discussed many times.
http://old.nabble.com/Koha-f14380.html

>
> Regarding the Sirsi migration, does anyone have any experiences with
> that?   We've had initial conversations with several service
> providers, but money is extremely tight right now and we are
> considering taking a stab at the migration ourselves.  If that fails,
> we can hire someone.  I'll gladly read the full docs before
> proceeding and I'm just looking for big ideas at this point. I think
> we can export Marc8 records from Sirsi and import them into Kaho.  Is
> there much more to the inventory conversion. I've not yet considered
> patron conversion.  Any tips or warnings?

Here again, the list and wiki.koha-community.org are your friend. You
might also jump on the #koha irc channel and ask around.

Kind Regards,
Chris