[Koha] Considering Kaho

[Rich Bright]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

Thanks
-- 

Rich Bright