SliTaz Forum

We are taking Slitaz to Kenya

(19 posts) (8 voices)

• Started 13 years ago by Anonymous
• Latest reply from Anonymous
• This topic is not a support question

Tags:

No tags yet.

1. 

   Anonymous
   

   offline

   Unregistered

   I'd like to say thanks to the Slitaz team. Here is how we are using Slitaz...

   We are establishing a medical record system from the network all the way up to the application, training, and inter-department phones. It is a 300+ bed facility in a rural setting which sees 17K patients a year. Siaya District Hospital. There will be over five dozen user terminals. And our aim is to drastically increase the number of patient visits through technology and process management.

   DESIGN
   * No central boot server(single point of failure)
   * The facility experiences power outages and voltage fluctuations on a daily basis
   * A generator which kicks in within a minute
   * There is heat, humidity and the occasional rodent chewing through cables

   SOLUTION
   * Thin clients running Slitaz on meager 128 MB flash drives
   * I can run a decent system on 400 MHz CPU, 256 MB RAM and 128 MB flash disk for about 20 USD each! I prefer 512 MB RAM for higher stability.
   * The main application will be accessed via Midori
   * OA consists of AbiWord and Gnumeric
   * sshfs mounts a fileserver

   The design and effort behind Slitaz is really enterprise-class. I find the system stable, GUIs light-weight and very responsive. The package manager works wonderfully and all the system controls are comprehensive. Thanks all.

   Posted 13 years ago #
2. 

   Anonymous
   

   offline

   Unregistered

   Nice to hear :D it is a solid solution :)

   Posted 13 years ago #
3. 

   devl547
   

   offline

   ~ # cook my_life

   Wow.. That's really AWESOME. If you need any additional software, features or optimizations in SliTaz - feel free to ask :)

   Posted 13 years ago #
4. 

   Anonymous
   

   offline

   Unregistered

   As an update, we changed our design to replace thin clients with used laptops without drives. We will also have a central boot server - a simple tftp one based on pfSense firewall - to alleviate the use of managing dozens of USB boot flash drives.

   Posted 13 years ago #
5. 

   veeko33
   

   offline

   Member

   .

   Posted 12 years ago #
6. 

   Anonymous
   

   offline

   Unregistered

   The tickets are bought and we leave on 27 Dec 2011 and back on 9 Jan 2012. There are two of us going with 6 suitcases of servers and laptops.

   Posted 12 years ago #
7. 

   Anonymous
   

   offline

   Unregistered

   Here is an update on the Kenya Hospital Automation using Slitaz trip. We have deployed 40 laptops and are converting 18 Windows machines to Slitaz clients. The laptops work great with 512 MB or greater memory, no battery and no hard drives. Slitaz is booted off a network server and includes sshfs for mounting, Abiword, Gnumeric and Firefox.

   In a place known for large amount of viruses(Windows), the OS and network booting of a pristine image everytime is a huge bonus. The freedom from USB drives and not having to backup local drives is also a big Systems Administration time saver.

   The image is LZMA compressed and takes up 55 MB. Uncompress times are bearable.

   We are still searching for a viable IM client.

   All in all, there is NO competing small-footprint Linux distro which even comes close to the compactness, stability and features that Slitaz provides. None!

   What's more, with the YAD GUI program installed, we have created popups for mounting the file server and now printing.

   Please keep in mind that the userbase is almost completely new to computers.

   Posted 12 years ago #
8. 

   Anonymous
   

   offline

   Unregistered

   We go live in this 220-bed hospital next month! We can print, we can mount a file server, we can browse and the network is speedy (qty 3, HP Procurve 24-gigabit-port switches). We are supporting about 100 users so far.

   Posted 12 years ago #
9. 

   rd.nmc
   

   offline

   Member

   "All in all, there is NO competing small-footprint Linux distro which even comes close to the compactness, stability and features that Slitaz provides. None!"

   I agree with you completely, Sidhu. I've tried lots of linux especially lightweight linux but there is nothing like Slitaz. Thanks to Slitaz team. Salute! ...

   Posted 12 years ago #
10. 

    Anonymous
    

    offline

    Unregistered

    As an update, we have upgraded all users from Slitaz 3.0 to 4.0 with some important changes. Abiword and Gnumeric get updated and can open the docx and xlsx formats. The workstations can finally show the real time and date for Kenya. Midori is now stable and we have moved away from Firefox because of memory related instability with multiple tabs open. The native screen resolution is also better. The user can lock the workstation. We did have to provide a reset script for a recurring "taskbar disappearing" bug.

    Posted 12 years ago #
11. 

    Anonymous
    

    offline

    Unregistered

    Another update is that the users have really taken to the whole system - these machines have been in use since 13 April 2012 and have seen over 25,000 patients and almost tripled the hospital's cash flow. None of this would have been possible without the magic of Slitaz.

    We have had a couple of requests to bid for projects!

    Posted 12 years ago #
12. 

    kultex
    

    offline

    Key Master

    sidhu,

    may I ask for a short ducumentation with some photos? - you will find my adress in the ola receipt - http://hg.slitaz.org/wok-stable/file/46b791df51ec/ola/receipt

    The background is, that I think we have to find sponsors to pay the work of the developers - and with sponsors I mean for example European Union, WHO, foundations......

    I have some time left in December and January and I want to try to get a solid financial basis for the future of Slitaz and I think a doku of your sucess story will really help

    Thomas

    Posted 12 years ago #
13. 

    Anonymous
    

    offline

    Unregistered

    Kultex,

    I sent you some text and pictures. I'll help where you need it. We need to bring out the genius of this distribution! Imagine if we can bundle this as a solution for schools etc with some hardware tuned to Slitaz.

    Posted 12 years ago #
14. 

    Trixar_za
    

    offline

    Key Master

    @sidhu The School idea is actually one idea I had for my own Country. We pay through the nose for educational software written in (*gasp*) HTML+JavaScript that sells for R10 000 - The same kind of lessons Linux software can do for free. Using SliTaz also means we can re-use old hardware which will pretty much cutting the budget needed for creating a computer lab near to zero.

    Posted 12 years ago #
15. 

    Tropetre
    

    offline

    Member

    I also thought of convincing my school to switch to Linux and I talked to a number of people including the system administrator and they told me that everything was managed from the city of Skellefteå, so I wen't to see the county computer administrator and asked him what they were going to do when Windows XP is getting shut down in December and he simply told me that they where going to install Windows 7 on ALL the PC's so I told him that the schools computers simply would not be able to run Windows 7 and if they even could they would become slower than they already are. (extremely) He replied: We will buy new computers for the county if they are required, yet, they claim that the county does not have money for more than 2 pencils per semester to the students...

    Posted 12 years ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply »

You must log in to post.