ZygoZone’s opening made the local Benoni City Times newspaper.
The attached article is a scan of the story, including a picture of the staff. Of course me and Paul Pollock had to add a twist to the posing… it’s a guy thing.
Click the picture for the fullsize version.
Today’s post is more of a thank you note than anything else.
Specifically I wish to thank Jamie Jackson and Nick Hill. These two enthusiasts went to significant trouble to work out all the subtleties of getting zybacafe’s dependencies (particularly postgres) installed and configured on Ubuntu, and contributed a script package to make the install much simpler.
I have made some very minor changes to it, mostly just to ensure it will be forward compatible with new releases without requiring changes, and built a derivative for OpenLab/Slackware.
You can download both the packages from this site. Choosing either Ubuntu or OpenLab..
I will add the download links for these to the zybacafe section of the site when I next update it, as well as hopefully finding time to actually update the user manual with the new features.
Thus far, I have deliberately not said anything about Novell’s partnership with Microsoft. I am after all a distro developer myself and I consider it very bad form to criticize other distro’s – I have always rather chosen to focus on what I believe OpenLab does right instead (whereas the founder of another distro actually sent a mail to the opensuze mailinglist announcing in effect ‘now that your distro sucks even more, why not try ours’).
Nevertheless, something with such a massive impact on the entire community cannot be completely ignored. Rather then, than my own opinions, I share with you the following letter, sent by Professor Derek Keats of the University of the Western Cape to Novell SA CEO Stafford Masie.
Professor Keats shared the mail with the South African anti-software patent mailing list, and gave permission to share it further.
Dear Stafford,
This is a personal email from me, not an official policy of UWC.
However, as the custodian of IT at UWC, I will be pursuing a full
investigation into a total exit strategy for all Novell products from
the University of the Western Cape.
As a non-trivial CUSTOMER of Novell, we will be looking at all our
Novell applications during the next 3-4 months, with a view to finding
the fastest possible way to get ALL NOVELL PRODUCTS completely out of
our environment. As a company that we have been customers of for over a
decade, Novell has let us down badly, and as customers, you may expect
us to vote with our feet and encourage others within the education
domain to do the same.
As noted by Bruce Perens, it is abundantly clear that Novell and
Microsoft took the time to engineer a circuitous legal path of issuing
covenants to each other’s customers, rather than licenses to each other,
in order to circumvent Novell’s earlier agreement with the community of
GPL software developers.
UWC both produces and depends on GPL licensed software, just like
Novell, and as the custodian of our work in this area, I find the
approach taken by Novell to be devoid of merit in relation to us as both
customers and producers.
As customers, you have failed to consider you ability as a company to
supply us with a quality product in the face of a significant percentage
of GPL licensed software owners moving from the GPL in its current
version to GPL Version 3, which will leave Novell products such as Suse
linux without access to upgrades and new versions of the software. This
includes important software like SAMBA, on which we rely for some key
operational functionality. Given that many other software producers are
stating their intentions to move to GPL V3, the quality of Novell
software will be compromised. As producers of software, you have forced
our hand. You leave us no choice but to consider the GPL version 3 for
our own software as well, in order to protect ourselves from
unscrupulous companies willing to betray their customers as Novell has
done.
I cannot guarantee that I will be able to extricate UWC from Novell, but
I can guarantee that I will try.
After 4.0.1 became the first public beta version of ZybaCafe, one important thing happened. Zygo went into serious business. This highlighted a number of previously unknown issues, which quickly became obvious in this real use environment.
So we had an internal only 4.0.2 beta, which highlighted another level of bugs and misfeatures, and worked those out.
Today, after a day of nearly smooth running, I am happy to anounce the second public beta for ZybaCafe 4.0
Version 4.0.3 represents nearly 14 days of continous effort since the last public beta (quite a long time for a FOSS project) but the changes should instantly appeal to those who have been running it.
They range from the subtle (like a database-reconfiguration option in the installer) to the complex (like an unpause button to defeat a clever and hard to achieve cheat around the screenlocking with the pause feature).
It’s up for download at the usual place. Have fun everyone.
bad^pun.end;
Sheez, to think I used to post an update practically daily 
but things have been seriously hectic this past week. The good news is zygo is open, the majority of the funky furniture is there. I coded my own machine-cloning system and that is working fine, our boxen is running smoothly.
Real use on zybacafe brought a number of bugs to light and fixes have been happening – so expect another beta soon.
The cool part is the wificlient is working beautifully on the first of our custom built access points. ZybaCafe hotspotting – here we come.
Last weekend was geekout time with netwrm and her hubbie flying up to come check out zygo and staying over with me. We had a kickass time. There is a joy to having your best friend whom you see all to rarely around for an entire weekend of geeking out.
Denis at one point asked us: “So what have you been doing all weekend ?” so NetWrm turned to me and said: “Define the perfect geek weekend”
My answer: “Two laptops and a couch”.
In retrospect I should have added (though in context it was clear) good friends, good beer and amar0k to the list.
Technorati Tags: wifi, ZybaCafe, hotspot, netwrm, zygo, amar0k
After another many sleepless nights, ZybaCafe 4.0.1, is out. The official beta for ZybaCafe 4.
New features in this release are quite numerous. There is a load of bugfixes in there, crashes fixed (and those who have been following will have seen many additions in the user manual as well). The plugin system was improved and largely finalized. New for your enjoyment is the integrated receipt printing. All sale actions now bring up a print dialog, you can of course cancel it, but if you don’t it will print out a nice little customer receipt with the details of the transaction (very nice for handing to your new customer as it has his username on it). The output is formatted to fit on thermal printers, and the printing is done through cups so all cups supported printers will work.
A long missing feature has also been added – special offer support. Offers allow you to define fixed unit-ammounts at fixed (non-standard) prices, with optional extras. When a sale is made, the seller can either sell units the traditional way, or select an offer which will preset the units and the price – and if any extras are defined remind the seller to give them to the customer.
I hope everyone has fun with this release, that your internet cafe’s will run smoother, and better (especially zygo of course), but remember it’s a beta, there may still be small bugs in there. If you find any, please give feedback on the mailing list and the bugtracker.
Technorati Tags: ZybaCafe, internet cafe, zygo
Well I sorta coined the term ‘zygosity’ to convey the very unique experience that is ZygoZone. After all we are known for pushing the old envelope and Zygo takes the concept of ‘internet cafe’ to places it has never dreamt of before.
So what then is the process of creating the technology to power it all ? When said technology starts with a tool called ‘ZybaCafe’… perhaps it would be ‘zybasity’ ?
If the feeling of excitement that comes in coding such a project can be named – that’s the best I can do – and it is exciting.
With the alpha out the door, work is continuing to make ZybaCafe a tool like no other. Today saw the addition of receipt printing for the admin tool – whenever time is added now, you get a print dialog, if you don’t cancel it (which is of course an option) it prints a receipt which conveniently doubles as a customer ticket.
The printing is done through cups so if cups can handle a printer, ZybaCafe can handle it as well and the actual receipts were structured to ensure they should fit cleanly on the thin-reams typically used in things like thermal printers.
On the other side of the door, the wifi client is coming along very nicely as well – by my tests, it’s damn near ready. It is themeable, and powerful and virtually impossible to beat. In future versions I’ll even look at adding some sort of sales function to it so people can by time for wifi access without going physically into the shop (no promisses on timeframe here – it’s difficult).
The wifi client differs from the other clients in being by far the hardest to install – after all it needs a lot of tweakage and correctly done hardware. So we’re seriously considering the idea of selling it in a box. You plug this little machine in, one side goes to your internet feed, the other has a wifi card. You now have a billing AP. There are multiple such devices on the market of course – but only one can integrate with your wired-icafe management system – which is extensible enough to be hooked up with things like your accounting system.
The last major missing piece of the windows client is also finished – so expect to see both these products on the market very shortly after we hit stable.
Linux users of course, the core zybacafe admin console and zblin client remains free both beer and speech.
So that’s the zybasity of the day. Of course OpenLab is busy as ever with several other projects happening as well, more on this in a future post.
Technorati Tags: zygosity, ZygoZone, Zygo, internet cafe, technology, zybasity, ZybaCafe, printing, cups, wifi
