Return to GRO
More LINC journals: Using Free (Open Source) Software
in a Grassroots Organization What follows is the first
installment of a continuation of journals on using GNU/Linux
that the Low-Income Networking and Communications (LINC)
Project of the Welfare Law Center released in the spring
of 2002. We will continue to release daily journals
over the next week documenting our progress on using
Free Software on the desktop. The rest of these journals
will be released on LINC Hot News. If you wish to receive
the rest of the journals as they are released, please
subscribe to LINC Hot News at http://lincproject.dyndns.org/mailman/listinfo/linc-hot-news.
The journals will also be available on the LINC Project
Website at http://www.lincproject.org/toolkit/linux.
Return to GRO, following up on the first stage of the
gnu/linux project. It's been almost a year since the
LINC Project last visited Grass Roots Organizing (GRO)
in Mexico, MO. On our last trip, we worked with a local
Linux Users Group to install and configure GNU/Linux
on a number of donated machines for use by GRO's board
members. You can read about that trip and out experiences
at http://www.lincproject.org/toolkit/linux/
On this trip, I was going back to see how things had
progressed and do some additional training with new
staff and board members. GRO has continued its commitment
to using Open Source Software in its office and to support
this I would also install, setup, and train staff on
using a database, and train staff on using Pagetool
to update GRO's website.
Day one:
Bad motel morning: why is it that I always get the
motels that don't have the little coffee machines in
the rooms. I'm useless without a decent dose of caffeine
in the morning, and I knew that I was going to need
it, so I stumbled down the hall to the lobby where I
grabbed a few cups of coffee and took them back to my
room to caffeinate while I mapped out my day.
Last time we were here, GRO had recently secured office
space in the basement of a realtor's office, and in
the time since our last visit had negotiated a deal
to get to the rest of the basement space as well. Naturally,
the first order of business was getting their computers
and DSL hooked up in the new space so that they could
use the old space as a conference room and meeting area.
On my way in from the hotel to their office, I had
my first (and only) major shock of the trip -- the diner
that we'd frequented on our last visit, the diner that
I was looking forward to visiting all of last week,
the diner with the really cheap breakfast and great
hashbrowns -- was gone.
Basement offices are like basement apartments -- they
can be really nice, or really dark, dank, and unpleasant.
Thankfully, GRO's is really nice, which was good since
I was going to spend the rest of the day crawling around
the floor and under desks getting two boxes and a firewall
up and running. A
t the office, I spent some time talking with Robin,
GRO's lead organizer, and later in the day met Angela,
one of the new staff that's started over the last few
months. Until very recently, GRO's consisted of two
staff -- Robin, here in Mexico, and Mary working out
of Columbia, so it's really exciting that they're able
to bring on more staff people. After catching up and
reviewing what we were going to do over the week that
I was there, I got to work assessing their current set
up, and figuring out where things were going to go.
Because their new space has a dividing wall between
Angela's office area and Robin's space, I knew we'd
need to drill a hole in the wall to run the cat5 between
the two machines. Additionally, we were going to need
to get some mouse, keyboard, and monitor extension cables
so that we could arrange Angela's computer to fit her
space. Once we got what we needed, I was able to start
the task of setting up the computers and DSL line.
My first priority was the DSL line, since I had a feeling
I'd need to download some other software in order to
get everything else working correctly. When we were
down here last, we'd set up an old Pentium 100 Dell
with IPCop to share a dial-up connection. IPCop
apparently didn't play well with SBC's pppoe settings,
so I did a quick install of Smoothwall
(the distro that IPCop is a fork of), and after some
hunting around, found the username and password info
I needed to get the connection working. 30 minutes into
this project, DSL was up and running without a problem!
Which was a big relief since I've had uneven luck with
SBC DSL connections, and was concerned about this. Being
a bit of a speed dork, I wanted to know just how fast
their connection was (and actually the upload speed
would be a factor in setting up their database), and
frankly, I was blown away. Their download speed was
higher than any DSL speed I'd see, but their upload
was kind of low. I was glad to see that since it would
mean that email and web pages would just about leap
onto the desktop, but the upload did concern me since
the Columbia office was going to be accessing the office
database and calendar over the DSL line. Since they're
on dial-up, I wasn't all that concerned, but I stuck
it in the back of my head as something to be thinking
about down the road.
The next step was to setup their main desktop machine
to connect to the net over the dsl line. Thankfully,
this proceeded without a hitch, and I was able to move
on to setting up the Linux
Terminal Server Project so that they could run one
of the older machines off the desktop until they are
able to get an additional desktop machine.
This seems as good a time as any to talk a bit about
the set up of the desktop machine. When we were down
here last year, we'd installed RedHat
7.2 on it, along with the usual set of office productivity
software. Unfortunately, because their Mexico staff
person was used to working from her house, and had all
her email going to the machine at home, the office (and
related tech stuff in the office) didn't get used as
much as I'd hoped -- but now GRO has more staff, so
the office is going to be used quite a bit more. In
the time between out last visit and now, their lead
organizer did make a valiant effort to use the new system,
but was pretty consistently stymied by the fact that
her Linux desktop and applications didn't behave exactly
like the windows box that she was used to using. As
a result, one of the members of MLUG
installed Crossover
Office (Crossover's a product that emulates Windows
so that you can run MS Office programs on Linux) for
her so that she could use the word processor that she
was used to using. Crossover works quite well, but it's
definitely got some issues -- largely around how it
maps letter drives to the linux filesystem -- a pretty
confusing thing even if you have a pretty good understanding
of how the linux filesystem works.
Having set up the desktop, it was time to tackle setting
up Linux Terminal Services Project (LTSP), which was
a smooth process with none of the bumps that I've encountered
in the past. This was nice because it was getting late
and there were still a couple of things that I wanted
to do before calling it a night. So, with ltsp set up
and running, I turned my attention to setting up mysql,
php, and apache so that I could set up the database
that I'd built for GRO.
[A word about Linux database applications, from the
end user's perspective: In a word, two actually, they
suck. I hate to say that because it's really the one
thing stopping us from whole-heartedly recommending
that more groups use GNU/Linux, but at present, there
just isn't a good database product that's as easy to
use as Filemaker or Microsoft Access, certainly nothing
that compares to Ebase. Prior to coming out here, I
did a pretty extensive review of the existing Linux
database GUI's and was sorely disappointed in what I
saw. Even OpenOffice's
ODBC connection, which I'd had high hopes for just wasn't
up to par, since it was just enough like Access to get
my hopes up, but different and undocumented enough to
make the experience confusing and difficult. Because
of this, and because of the fact that GRO needed to
access their database from both offices, in the end
I decided to bite the bullet and build a database using
mysql, php, and apache.]
Setting up MySQL,
PHP, and Apache
was a simple as downloading and installing the rpms,
and then the fun started.
Thinking that everything was going great, I copied
the database package over to the desktop, unpacked it,
ran the sql file to setup and create the database, created
the mysql user, and generally did what I thought needed
doing to get things up and running. Then I went to test
it out and things failed -- and failed in the most annoying
way. When I'm doing tech work, I like things to either
work or not work -- it's the half-working stuff that
drives me batty, and that's exactly what I had. After
spending about an hour going through different things,
I got things working (much thanks to Google
-- by far one of the most invaluable tools when it come
to tech troubleshooting). It turns out that with the
8.0 release which GRO was running, there was some funny
stuff going on with the php config file and with Apache's
config file.
Once I found the problem, fixing it was easy, but for
that hour, I was terrified that all the work I'd done
to build the database was for nothing, and that it wouldn't
work. In the end, it did all work, so I called it a
day and headed back to the motel to get some food, rest,
and to think about what tomorrow held in store: tying
up loose ends on the office stuff (shared folder, shortcuts
on the desktop, etc, and trying to get some of the other
boxes from my last visiting working so that we can get
them out to board members if necessary).
Stay Tuned for Day Two: creative ways to get
dial-up in rural Missouri!
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