About PenyuLAN

Penyu Radius is a special unit under Millennium Radius Sdn Bhd (“MR”) which has been setup, organized and operated in Dungun, Terengganu, MALAYSIA since January 2010.

PenyuLAN is a free software to monitor computers in a local area network. PenyuLAN is most suitable for internet café monitoring system. However, the features are also useful for school computer labs for monitoring purpose.

PenyuLAN can be used on local area network (LAN) whereby it will connect to the client PCs through the IP using designated port number.

PenyuLAN can perform the following remote control and monitoring on client PCs:-

1. Lock and unlock screen
2. Logoff
3. Restart
4. Shutdown
5. Send warning message
6. Capture screen
7. Check running program

Screenshot

Additional features which are suitable for internet cafe operations are:-

1. Record time and amount of usage for each PC
2. Currency is based on computer regional setting
3. To record food and beverage and other services
4. User account control
5. Comprehensive management report

PenyuLAN comes in three (3) editions which are Ganu Edition, Keropok Edition and Ikang Edition. The only difference between these editions is on the number of computers it can monitor.

As to date, PenyuLAN software is totally free without any limitation on number of use or any advertisement or nagging screen. For Keropok and Ikang Editions, you need to register to activate the software and registration is free.

With Penyu Radius software, internet cafe operators can now automate their business operation with free cyber cafe software. PenyuLAN is a cyber cafe software which is easy to use. PenyuLAN cyber cafe software will update PC monitoring usage for every second. This will allow the administrator to monitor PC usage with most updated information.

They are  also offer software customization to suit your special needs. PenyuLAN is not only suitable for internet cafe but also useful for schools or colleges computer lab. You will find it easier to monitor every computers in your computer lab.

Make sure you get the latest version of PenyuLAN software to ensure your cyber cafe operates with the latest version. They are gradually fix any problem with PenyuLAN cyber cafe software. Improvement and enhancement has been continuously performed to ensure their users get the best performance out of the free cyber cafe software.

You can download PenyuLAN from here : Download Site

Millennium Radius
(Dungun Branch)
No 4, Jalan Pak Sabah
23000 Dungun, Terengganu
MALAYSIA
Tel: 609-8444 277
Fax: 609-8445 277
Email: penyu@penyuradius.com
URL: http://www.penyuradius.com

Linux Terminal Server Project [1]

The Linux Terminal Server Project ( LTSP) is a configuration of Linux that allows you to connect lots of low-powered thin client terminals to a Linux server. The LTSP provides a simple way to utilise low cost workstations as either graphical or character-based terminals on a GNU/Linux server.

K12LTSP is based on RedHat Fedora Linux and the LTSP terminal server packages (see Section 7.1.1 for more detail). It’s easy to install and configure. It’s distributed under the GNU General Public License. That means it’s free and it’s based on Open Source software.

Once installed, K12LTSP lets you boot diskless workstations from an application server.

What is Thin Client Computing?
Thin client and fat client (also called “thick” or “rich” client) are mostly marketing terms for different configurations of computer. A thin client asks a central server to do most of its processing, and keeps as little hardware and software as possible on the workstation side. Ideally, the user of a thin client should have only a screen, keyboard, mouse and enough computing power to handle display and network communications — you don’t even need (or want) a hard drive. The less you have, the less there can go wrong.

A fat client does as much processing as possible itself and only passes data required for communications and storage on to the server. A standalone PC is the typical fat client with which everyone is familiar.

A thin client may be a software program executing on a generic PC, or it may be a hardware device, called a terminal, designed to provide only user input and display functions. Because old PCs (whether retired, written off, obsolete or just out of fashion) are easier to find than specialised thin client hardware, Edubuntu labs uses them as thin clients, with the appropriate software. Because they don’t do much work themselves, the hardware requirements for these “old” PCs are very basic. Since every client in a thin client network asks a central server to do its work, all the individual workstations look the same: they all share the same server, and they all behave exactly like the server would if you were using it directly.

In addition, although everyone who uses the lab can have their own computing environment stored on the server, with their own files, desktop, and so on, the individual workstations can’t get viruses or be misconfigured by curious learners — there simply isn’t anything to configure! The thin client doesn’t have enough brains to get confused.

This means that the lab computers are trivial to keep up and maintenance is restricted to the server in the back room.

Thin clients are cheaper and require less administration than fat clients. On the other hand, they tend to require far greater network bandwidth, as display data will probably need to be passed to the thin clients. They can’t do a single thing on their own — for each and every action, they need to talk to the server. This means that a server for a room full of thin clients must be much more capable than a server used by fat clients.

One of the advantages that this configuration entails, is that all the software resides on the server, and so you only have to upgrade it once. In a fat client configuration, every workstation has its own copies of the software, and so any upgrade needs to be rolled out to every workstation.

Drawbacks
Graphics-intensive applications such as games will not perform well, as all the display information will have to be pushed over the network by the server. This is hundreds of times slower than driving a local graphics card. Playing action games, however, is not a goal of the Edubuntu lab project.

Hardware
Minimum specifications for LTSP Client and Server

Server

• Memory The server should have 2GB RAM or more (512MB for the base system, and 50MB for each additional client). As long as you’re using it all up, more RAM means more speed (it doesn’t help to have RAM that you don’t use). Too little RAM will bring your server to a crawl as it starts swapping memory to the hard drive. If you run out of memory, performance will be unacceptable.
• Hard drive SCSI is faster than IDE: We’ve seen LTSP servers slow to a crawl when more than 10 clients are running from IDE drives. SCSI drives are better equipped to handle the multiple read/write requests.
• Network Your server will have at least one Ethernet card to create a private network ( 192.168.0.x). This card connects to a switch for terminals. If there is a school network to which you need to connect, or if the school has a internet connection via the server, it will have a second Ethernet card, which will get an IP address on the second network.

Clients

• Memory Client workstations should have at least 32MB of RAM. Clients aren’t that dependent on swap space for extra memory capacity, since memory usage on them is reasonably constant because they don’t execute applications: they only display them.
• Hard drive Client workstations should not have hard drives.
  Network Each client workstation should have one network card with a boot ROM to enable booting from the network.

DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux) [2]

DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux) is a free software, open source solution to managing the deployment of the GNU/Linux operating system across many clients. Imagine the time required to install GNU/Linux on 40, 30, or even 10 client machines individually! DRBL allows for the configuration all of your client computers by installing just one server machine.

DRBL provides a diskless or systemless environment for client machines. It works on Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS and SuSE. DRBL uses distributed hardware resources and makes it possible for clients to fully access local hardware. It also includes Clonezilla, a partitioning and disk cloning utility similar to Symantec Ghost®.

Peacefully coexists with other OS
DRBL uses PXE or etherboot, which is similar to Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), to boot the client machine. While LTSP is a centralized server, all the client machine users’ access the LTSP server to run their applications on it. The client’s keyboard and mouse are used to input whereas the client’s monitor is used to display the results. This is great when useing a thin client.[1]

The server requirements must be increased when more than 20 or 30 clients are being used. On the other hand, DRBL uses NFS and NIS to provide boot services to the client machines. In essence, the DRBL server is just a NFS and NIS server. All users from all client machines just access the DRBL server to request files or authentication.

Packages are loaded to the client machines and they use their own CPU and RAM for processing. A regular PC can be used as the DRBL server since it is only serving files and authenticating. The client machines, however, should be powerful enough to run the applications they need. Typical installations using DRBL to deploy the Linux classroom have around 30 to 40 clients.

///NOTE/// From LTSP 5.0, there is a fat client (diskless workstation, LowFat client) mode, it’s basically quite similar to DRBL

Save on hardware, budget, and maintenance fees

Hard drives are optional for a DRBL client. Actually, the hard drive is just another moving part that creates more noise and is susceptible to failure. If a hard drive is present, the client can be configured to use it as swap space while GNU/Linux is installed and configured on the centralized boot server.

A lot of time can be saved by configuring the client settings at the boot server when using the DRBL centralized boot environment. This gives the system administrator more control over what software configurations are running on each client.

Besides the diskless (fat/powerful) client mode provided by DRBL, DRBL provides other functions, such as:

(a) Clonezilla, the opensource clone system. It’s a server version of imaging tool, similar to Ghost server edition, True image or Rembo.By using Clonezilla, you can clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to 40 computers within 10 minutes via multicasting.

(b) Small Linux diskless soltion. DRBL provides Damn Small Linux (DSL), PuppyLinux… for clients. You can import those small Linux distributions and let client boot from PXE without hardisk, CD or USB flash drive.

(c) Diskless FreeDOS for clients.

(d) Diskless memtest for clients.

(e) Install GNU/Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Mandriva, SuSE…) for clients from network.
LTSP and DRBL each have their own benefits. Choose the one that is best suited to your needs.

What kind of server and client should I buy if I want to use DRBL ?

This depends on what kind of application and GNU/Linux distribution you want to run.
For the education environment, we recommend the following, but faster and newer equipment will always be better, especially if you want to run “moden” GNU/Linux distribution, such as Fedora 7 or Ubuntu 7.04 with OpenOffice 2.x or Firefox 2.x…:

• Server:
  • • x86 CPU at least 450 MHz
    • Memory at least 256 MB
    • Two or more fast ethernet network interface cards (NICs)
    • At least 10 GB HD space
• Client:
  • • x86 CPU at least 200 MHz
    • Memory at least 128 MB
    • One fast ethernet network interface cards

• Fast ethernet switch
  • • An ethernet hub is NOT acceptable. It’s too slow for network booting and NFS. A fast ethernet switch will reduce the collision domain and give you much smoother deployment. The fast ethernet switch should have enough ports for your clients and your server. You can find low cost 12 and 16-port fast ethernet switches just about anywhere. The 40+ port switches are nice but they typically cost more.

Since DRBL will work with any Pentium class hardware, you can start your PC cluster with just about any machine you have laying around. You can expand your cluster as your budget allows.

Where can I download the source codes ?

You can find all the source codes about DRBL/Clonezilla in http://free.nchc.org.tw/drbl-core/src/

Who is the developer of DRBL/Clonezilla?

DRBL and Clonezilla was developed by NCHC http://www.nchc.org.tw

What is NCHC ?

The National Center for High-Performance Computing is located in Hsinchu, Taiwan. For more details, please visit the NCHC website at http://www.nchc.org.tw

What is CloneZilla?

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition. Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla server edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla server edition was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Features of Clonezilla[3]

• Free (GPL) Software.
• Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, and FAT, NTFS of MS Windows. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux or MS windows. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
• LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
• Multicast is supported in Clonezilla server edition, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
• Based on Partimage, ntfsclone and dd to clone partition. However, clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
• By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.

Editions
Clonezilla Live: Allows you to use CD/DVD or USB flash drive to boot and run clonezilla (Unicast only)
Clonezilla server edition: A DRBL server must first be set up in order to use Clonezilla to do massively clone (Both unicast and multicast are supported)

Which one is suitable for diskless gaming platform?

So Which one are the perfect candidate for Diskless Linux Gaming Server and Client? My answer is DRBL, why? Because DRBL client is a fat client that doesn’t rely too much hardware dependencies on Server like LTSP Client.

References :

[1] : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdubuntuDocumentation/EdubuntuCookbook/ThinClient

[2] : http://drbl.sourceforge.net/about/

[3] : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Clonezilla_Server_Edition

Date: 29 June – 1 July, 2010
Venue: Level 14, Berjaya Times Square Hotel, Kuala Lumpur

Come join us at the MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference 2010! You’ll be pleasantly surprised…

Who should attend?

• Business executives from local and foreign companies
• Open Source developers, communities, inventors, evangelist, researchers, strategist
• Government officers
• Students, general public

Why you should attend?

1. Provide exposure and knowledge on the importance of Open Source in enhancing competitiveness by giving freedom of choice in software usage with lower total cost of ownership, hence benefiting businesses and society at large. Over 30 session tracks are made available.
2. Share amongst the open source community on new directions and latest innovations by the subject matter experts, thought leaders and industry gurus.
3. Provide a platform for conference participants to actively interact, share and exchange views, ideas, and tools on the latest trends and issues of Open Source.
4. Networking, learning and having great fun!

Note: Please bring this item for hands on workshop

• Laptop/Netbook/Notebook
• Extension Plug or Additional Plug
• Install VMware/Virtual Box (Any Operating System OSS)
• Additional Internet Broadband (If required)

During conference we have free gift to give to participant that do something to us. Make sure you do and claim your rewards. We have 3 categories below:

1) Fill the Customer Survey Form and we will have lucky draw each day.

2) Blast as many tweet #mosc2010 (RT didn`t count) about OSS and speakers and topic

3) Blog as many you can about events topic by our speakers and notified us (Sp

This great software inherit many features from CCL with many enhancement, as you knows CCL is one of our best billing and point of sales system we ever use.

Mkahawa is a swahili word for Cafe. Mkahawa builds on the small but fast Cafe Con Leche (CCL) – the light, but ultra-fast C++ Internet Cafe Management Software for Linux and Windows. This is but a continuation of CCL development in just another form.

About Mkahawa

Mkahawa is an open-source project that builds on Cafe Con Leche or CCL – the nifty, cross-platform Internet Cafe billing and Management Software started by Bruno Deferrari. It extends CCL’s traditional cross-platform nature, simplicity, lightness and speed with major additional features.

Mkahawa project also aims to provide up-to-date binary installers for the different Linux distros and Windows versions. This website has add-ons and non-Linux installers. Free source and some binaries can be found at sourceforge.net .

FIFA World Cup Edition is NOT an admission that the Mkahawa Team will be spending a whole month watching the largest, most entertaining and prestigious soccer contest in the World.

Features

• Staff Access Management (Login & Logout)
• Choice of post-paid and prepaid billing
• Stronger membership management
• Tickets printing and management
• Speed-buttons for simple usage
• Installers for Ubuntu, Zencafe(Zenwalk) and Windows
• Automatic charging for print-outs
• Multi-language capability
• Client updates from the server
• Session Management ( Feature Requests)
• Session Start, Stop, Pause
• Timeout Settings Timer
• Client Seat/Session Swapping
• Count Up/Down Timer
• Configurable Blocker Image
• Post-paid / Prepaid modes
• Server Functionality ( Feature Requests)
• View Client status in real time
• View Client status in colored icons
• View Instant Status list
• Session Cost Cashing & Discounts
• Products Sale & Reports
• Versatile Tariff Configuration
• Membership Management
• Multi-level Staff Access Control
• View Session and Sales Logs
• Generate Session and Sales Reports
• Generate and Print Tickets
• Client Computer Control
• Shutdown and Reboot
• Temporary Blank Screen
• Client Update from Server
• Client Upgrade Capability

Mkahawa 0.0.3

This is the latest version released on 13th March, 2010. You can download it from here

• Options for post-paid and prepaid billing
• Options for rounding off price to .00, .05, .10 and .50
• Support for non-alphabet scripts eg Chinese, Indian, Russian, Korean
• Tickets: Printing and general management
• Improved looks – Graphical buttons

It IS a recognition that Mkahawa is used all over the world, and is an expression of our solidarity with FIFA’s core values of authenticity, unity, performance and integrity.

Mkahawa Downloads

These are the latest files for the open-source Mkahawa Internet Cafe management software. Pick older files from here

Requirement

Mkahawa Server and Client supports the following operating system:

• Linux operating system especially Ubuntu Linux
• Windows XP (you need to buy to obtain mkahawa windows client and server via paypal)

Recomended

Although we are still running a test to this software on our DRBL server and client but we are highly recomending Mkahawa for cyber cafe owners who was running CCL before this.

More info about mkahawa:

Website : http://mkahawa.sourceforge.net

Project and Download site : http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/mkahawa

According to wikipedia the last public version of Yahoo! Messenger for Unix was released in September 2003, while an unofficial beta (v1.0.6) from a Yahoo! employee was released around the same time.

But they keep upgrading the version for Mac? And now it is version 3.0.1 for the current beta released on March 26, 2010.

Yahoo Messenger has some great features that was making it so popular, and most of our customers was familiar with it, although there is an alternative like gyachi, kopete, pidgin, and empathy, our customers prefer to use Yahoo Messenger instead of those alternative instant messengers, and why?

Because Yahoo Messenger is so user friendly and easy to use, and one frequent reason is when using alternative instant messenger such as pidgin, most of our customer being afraid to create their account even without password.

The Linux / Unix version of Yahoo! Messenger is terribly outdated, and probably won’t even connect. The Windows version does not run well, even under Wine. The web version of yahoo messenger quite good but the customers still want the native version of it.

Yahoo Messenger On Mac

Yahoo Messenger On Linux

What we really need?

So do we need another yahoo messenger replacement? I dont think so, what we need now is an enhancement of current open source instant messenger program that could mimic the original Yahoo Messenger, and we are still waiting for it.

CafePilot supports connections over the Internet so Internet cafe businesses with multiple branches can use a centralized server. This will allow customers to roam between branches with generated pre-paid tickets.

Best of all, CafePilot is free and open source! [http://sourceforge.net/projects/cafepilot/]

CafePilot Service Request Monitor (SRM) allows a Cafe manager to see, in real-time, requests for attention by customers and the status of those requests. An attendant can also monitor the SRM to see what refreshments/products customers are ordering. Best of all, there is no limit to the number of SRMs that can run on your network and SRM license comes free with CafePilot.

General Feature List

• Cross-platform (Windows and Linux)
• SQL database, no OLE MS Jet Engine problems
• Comprehensive log page
• Easily export accounts to a comma delimited flat file for easy integration with other systems
• Choice of creating Barcode tickets that allow customer to scan instead of typing login information
• CafePilot closes all specified application (including browser) windows when customer logs out

Billing

• Prepaid billing with customizable tickets e.g. add company name and logo
• Barcode tickets.
• Create and print accounts in bulk.
• Create accounts with custom username and password
• Expiring accounts, based on a calendar date or specific duration after first logon
• Limit ticket validity to particular time periods based on group
• Customizable low time warning
• Per-second billing
• Re-usable tickets
• Create different account types and set diffrent rates for each e.g. “night-time” tickets, “2Hr” tickets etc
• Easily edit accounts. Change credit, expiration and delete accounts

Security

• Definable range of allowed IP addresses on the server so no foreign CafePilot client connects to your server.
• Customizable staff permissions e.g. allow a staff to create accounts while denying him the right to delete or edit them.
• CafePilot Client lets you run your workstations on Guest account so as to prevent customers from tampering with your workstations.

Reports

• Automatically get Internet cafe activity reports by email daily or weekly (as customized). CafePilot will send diffrent reports to different email addresses as specified
• View activity reports for both administrative functions (account creation, editing etc) as well as workstation usage
• View reports on service request and product purchases
• Export reports to a variety of formats including PDF, HTML and XML

Product Server/Service Request Monitor

• Install as many Service request monitors as you want
• Give your customers the convinience of requesting attention or ordering products, refreshments and services right from their workstations
• Get a report of ordered products and services, including whether they were fulfilled or cancelled

License

• Free!

source : http://www.cafepilot.com/

Although I’m a cyber cafe owner but I am not a games freak, but Glest had caught my eyes 3 years ago, when I started osscc.org. Glest is a good 3D real time strategy game, the game is still under good development progress. You can play Glest on LAN or single player also. Although Glest is not as advance as Warcraft III, but I really enjoy playing it some time, even those kids when we did an exhibition last year gave us a positive feedback when they play Glest on our diskless linux gaming system using DRBL.

Installation

Installing Glest on Ubuntu Linux is far too easy, open your terminal and type the following command:

# sudo apt-get install glest

Glest is a free 3D real-time strategy game, where you control the armies of two different factions:Tech, which is mainly composed of warriors and mechanical devices, and Magic, that prefers mages and summoned creatures in the battlefield.

Glest is not just a game, but also an engine to make strategy games, based on XML and a set of tools. A few mods already exist.

Mega Glest

Their other project called MegaGlest seems doesn’t  has so many progress since they registered the project at SourceForge.net on Jan 22 2010, and is described by the project team as follows :

“Currently there is no active development of the real time strategy game glest. This project aims to improve the game and its content. It already has a lot more content than the original game and contains bugfixes and improvements.”

And the stable release of MegaGlest is version 3.3.3 and can be downloaded from here : http://glest.org/glest_board/index.php?topic=5283.0

Glest Development Team

Glest is made by a bunch of friends, most of them from Spain. If you wish to contact them, please send an e-mail or post on their board.

Martiño Figueroa. Glest game, engine and tools coder.
MS in Computer Science by the University of Coruña (Spain). e-mail.

Glest Official Website : http://www.glest.org/

Glest Blog : http://glestblog.blogspot.com/

Glest Forum : http://glest.org/glest_board/

From my experiences running a cyber cafe business and provides certain solution to the others cyber cafe owners, Ubuntu Linux 10.04 or the previous version of it, is the perfect choice to be the server and the client operating system for cyber cafe purpose.

It has everything except POINT OF SALES software, dont believe on me? try to click ubuntu main menu > Ubuntu Software Center > Search for cyber cafe and you’ll get nothing except blank white page. But try search for point of sale and you will get “lemon point of sale” but this software wasn’t meant for cyber cafe purpose, it was created for general such as restaurant or book store.

One thing until now what Open Source Operating System such as Ubuntu or perhaps I should say Canonical still couldn’t beat Microsoft is the supports from game developer, but currently i heard that Steam is coming to Linux, until now we still need to using wine and other emulators to play warcraft III, counter strike and so on.

For me, that is why the progress in running gaming center or cyber cafe business based on open source software was far too slow and just few small company had put their interest to develop a billing system or pos system for linux operating system but still their software lacks many of important features, I didn’t say I am condemns their software, for me it’s a good effort for them and us, but we are still waiting for the perfect point of sales for open source cyber cafe.

Others POS system such as OpenbravoERP, OpenbravoPOS, OpenERP are good software makers but still the softwares wasn’t meant for cyber cafe, internet cafe or gaming center.

Why is this happen? I don’t know, or maybe they think that running cyber cafe and gaming center business using an open source product couldn’t help the progress to expanding the influences. Instead of that, still some of others contributor was willing to spend their time, money and privacy to creating POS system such as ccl, mkahawa, gbilling and others, but still to software need more support on their development. Ubuntu or Canonical should supporting them in their software development(cyber cafe billing system).

So if you asked me what is the perfect POS system for open source cyber cafe should it looks like? If you look to the Cafesuite.net features then we might get some point how it should be. And if we takes their features to suggest what kind of billing system we really need for cyber cafe cafe then it’s could be just like below:

Security

It should provides many levels of security, ensuring that your business is always under control.

Workstation lock

Unused workstations can be securely locked so that no one can use them without proper authorization from the operator.

Operator profiles

You can create many profiles for your employees with different access rights. Not every one should be able to change crucial options or pricing schemes.

Encrypted data files

All databases used by CafeSuite are encrypted which ensures they can’t be tampered with by unouthorized individuals.

Backups

It’s possible to create backups of data files automatically evey given period of time. Your data will be secure even when your system crashes.

Ease of use

The user interface is clean and feels very natural even to begginers. The integrated help system will guide you in case of any problems.

Customer accounts

It’s should makes it really easy to manage large database of customer accounts. You can create different types of accounts for your customers — time accounts, cash accounts, debt accounts and unlimited accounts. You can assign beneficial charging rates to customer accounts to reward devoted customers.

Customers will be able to log on by themselves using their account ID and password. It’s also possible to create smart, magnetic or barcode cards for your customers, so that a simple scan of their card will log them on.

Reservations

It should provides unique graphical workstation reservation system. Simply select a time period on the workstation chart to create the reservation.

In case of a very big traffic, you’ll appreciate the Waiting queue function, allowing you to manage the waiting list.

Reports and statistics

The software provides you with a range of reports and statistics summarizing your business performance. Starting with very general reports, you can even get a list of all operations performed by your employees minute by minute.

Flexible charging rates

Real strength of the software lies in the flexible charging rates system. You can configure many schemes of pricing, including periodical discounts.

You can assign different charging rates to computer groups, beneficial pricing can be used with customer accounts. You can even create traffic discounts that adjust prices depending on the number of free computers in your cafe.

Support for external devices

You can use barcode scanner, magnetic card or smartcard reader to logon users with accounts and sell products. the software also supports receipt printers for printing receipts and account tickets.

Integration with Printer

The software integrates with Printer allowing you to keep control over your printers. Once a customer prints some pages, the software will notify the operator about that and calculate the charge automatically.

For your information, I’ve waiting the Cafesuite for linux, they said to running the software on linux since 2006 but until now there is nothing at all.

For me I would like to add some features to the above, it should supports diskless terminal client, for now I’ve tested CCL to be able to lock down diskless client. I think I should makes an article or tutorial about it.

Post installation

After a successful installation and boot to the newly installed Ubuntu Lucid with out problem, now it’s time for the post-installation. You might consider to create a user if you want, login as root with your previous password:

Step 1. You will need to edit your hosts file