Joachim Breitner's Homepage

A few month ago, I blogged a way to spread Free Software effectively, especially in developing countries: By deploying Free Software in internet cafés, where most people learn their way around computers. Most of them (and there are a lot, much more than in Europe) have a buisness plan that relies on software for free, but currently they achieve that through pirating Windows and software like Cybercafe Pro. Back than, I wrote this more or less theoretically, but it happend that I ended up having some time to actually start working on it.

While Free Software, especially Debian, provides a very good base to build internet cafés from, one key component is more or less missing: Software to hand out these codes (“timecodes”) to the customer, to let them log in and surf for the time they bought. Very recently, Zybacafe was released, but I did not really like it, nor felt like maintaining a Pascal/Lazarus based Debian package. So I went ahead and implemented my own ideas.

The Idea is to keep it very simple, very modularized and integrate deeply with normal unix ideas. So what we have now is a PostgreSQL database (one table so far), and all communication just goes via this table, so we don’t have to design or implement complicated protocols. A python gtk application for the front desk generates the timecodes that are then, on paper, passed to the customer. The workstations greet the user with standard GDM, but our pam modules authenticates the timecode instead of a username/password pair. While using the system, a small floating window informs the user about the remaining time. If he does not log out voluntarily, a system daemon will kill all his processes eventually.

The long term mission is to form that into a Custom Debian Distribution that will install the server hassle-less, and besides being pre-configured for the internet café’s needs, also immediately serves as an automated installation server for the workstations (think FAI), all useing stock Debian packages, as far as possible. Another pam module could, upon login, mount the homedirectory as a copy-on-write overlay of a template user’s home directory, and through away the changes afterwards. The goal is to offer easier installation, less maintenance, better robustness and more flexibility than the current common non-free systems.

But, of course, this project needs help. First of all: Users! If you have any use for time-limited logins (Internet café, school surf terminaly, parents with otherwise not to bed going kids), you can be an earliy adaptor. Developers are very welcome as well, and due to the modular structure, cooperation should be quite smooth.

The development happens on alioth, where we have the subversion repositry, as well as on the Debian wiki page. Alpha packages for these components can be found on the alioth group’s webspace. We do not have a mailing list yet, but feel free to e-mail me. We will set up a mailing list once there is a need for it. Thank’s to the KACE for supporting this.