“I wanted to see what tools were available for creating a Web application anybody could use to maintain a Web site and do online collaboration,” Guermeur says. He found that the classic LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl) was exactly what he needed to create a full-featured content management system.

Guermeur built an application that includes file management, Web page templates and themes, a discussion forum, calendaring, group and user controls, a task manager, and MySQL database tools. When he was done, he was impressed with what he’d done. “I said, ‘I’m pretty sure everybody needs what I’ve just created. Let’s put it up on the Internet.’ Within 30 days we were in the top 10 downloads on SourceForge.net. I quit my day job,” and launched a company, Metadot, to support his creation, dubbed Metadot Portal Server, or just Metadot.

Guermeur says his company’s main income stream comes from the technical support it provides for some of the larger companies and entities using Metadot. “We have 10,000 downloads every month. Out of these, anywhere between one and 10 will buy something.” He says the US Navy buys a lot of tech support, but the universities and colleges on his user list usually have plenty of experienced admins on campus, “and they don’t need us at all.” Guermeur doesn’t mind. He says doesn’t want his company to get too big because he likes what he calls the “open source lifestyle.”

“We are trying to stay small,” he says. Metadot employs 10 people including Guermeur. “The benefit is that you control the destiny of your software. You can be very agile and address your user base needs very quickly. When you are a big company, you become part of a big system that will evolve on the market demands. It’s a bigger machine.”

Part of Metadot’s agility is the community surrounding its development. “The main advantage [of having access to the community] is that the marketing is free [because of word-of-mouth advertising]. Also, we get lots of feedback and help,” Guermeur says. “They say, ‘Hey, you have a bug and here’s a way to fix it. Sometimes they fix it for us.” Even so, Guermeur cannot rely completely on an itch-scratching community. “They’re working for free, so they don’t work on our schedule, they work on their schedule. The more we have of these people the better, but there is still some overheard because we need to keep the software available and we need to make sure that when there is a new version it works for everyone. There is a cost there.”

Guermeur says he uses open source throughout the company. “We run Ubuntu on workstations and Red Hat on the servers.” He and his development team use the Eclipse development environment, as well as Ruby on Rails, the MySQL database, and “sometimes Java.” Since Metadot runs on Windows and Mac OS X, they keep a few workstations around with those operating systems loaded. “But most of us use Linux,” he says.

Even though Guermeur is content to keep Metadot small, he still keeps expanding the product line, which now includes a hosted help desk application called Mojo, and his latest offering, Montastic, a free Web-based server monitoring application. He says the key to his success has been his enthusiasm for providing great technology to his customers. “You start a business because you have a passion for your product and you want to share it with your user base. It’s peer relations. If you have an idea of making a million dollars, you may want to look at another business model.”

Amy Begg De Groff, the library’s IT director, says Howard County libraries are well supported by its patrons. “We get very gracious funding from the county residents, but the majority of the money goes to [book] collections and payroll. So the funding just doesn’t keep up with our IT needs.” Because of that, five years ago, the library was exploring alternatives to Microsoft Windows and its steep licensing fees.

De Groff says the library created and deployed a custom kernel that provided patrons with a browser to search the catalog and access the Internet. They wanted more. “Word processing, instant messaging, sound, video -– they just wanted more, more more,” she says. “When they walk in and see a computer, they expect it to function just like it does at home.”

The library wanted to grant its patrons’ wishes without leaving Linux behind. “We were very committed to open source. We exploring building another kernel or going with a vendor.” De Groff says they looked at Userful’s DiscoverStation, a popular choice with other public libraries moving to open source software, but “we felt locked down with too many of the options. We didn’t like the look of it –- we wanted to offer something as close to XP as possible. And with Userful, what we found is that as we slowly took away functionality, we broke other things.”

The other alternative De Groff tested was Groovix, an Ubuntu-based distribution that provides many of the options consumers expect from their desktop experience. “After I saw the Groovix deployment, with RealPlayer and other media support, there was no turning back. We begin piloting in January and it went effortlessly.” De Groff tested the operating system on her existing hardware, upgrading the RAM from 128MB to 512MB. “The bulk of them are Dell GX150s with some GX100s,” she says. “The newest machines are four years old.” De Groff also added GCompris, a GPLed educational software package for children that includes more than 80 games.

De Groff advises other libraries considering a move to open source software to do their homework first. “I recommend an extensive survey of customer activity,” she says. “We talked to our staff and they said the customers were searching the catalog. But when we talked to the customers, they said, ‘We’re reading email and doing online banking.’ And then when we tracked hits, 70% of them were to MySpace. They may also be banking and need a secure system, but the audio and video are obviously very important as well. Your feedback from the staff isn’t always consistent with the data you’re going to generate -– so put it all together and meet all those needs.” And don’t forget training, De Groff says. “You need to extensively train your front line staff. We did three hours of hands-on, mandatory training.”

De Groff says the biggest benefit of the upgrade has been the added functionality at a cost that is a fraction of what licensed proprietary systems would have been. “We spent $2,000 in tech support and $25 system-wide for the software,” she says. “The biggest expense was the RAM upgrade, which cost $20,000. Oh, and I bought some T-shirts.”

Still, for a rank beginner, Ubuntu might take a little over-the-shoulder help getting plugins and other essential applications installed. Automatix sure sounds like an answer. It installs multimedia codecs that help you play sound and video files properly, all the usual Firefox plugins that you forget you need until you need them (Java, Flash, Adobe reader, MPlayer, etc.), archive support, Skype, an FTP client, several file-sharing programs, multimedia editors, a DVD ripper, RealPlayer, the Opera browser, and a lot more.

To test Automatix, I started with a fresh install of Ubuntu Breezy. Automatix supports all versions of Ubuntu up to Breezy, including Kubuntu and Edubuntu. It doesn’t support Dapper, PPC, or AMD64 yet. Once the installation was complete, I logged in, opened Firefox, Googled for “automatix,” and clicked on the first link, which happened to be to a complete Automatix tutorial on ubuntuforums.org. The tutorial was posted last year and makes reference to Ubuntu Hoary, but it works just fine for Breezy.

At first I was looking around for a place to download Automatix, but as I continued to read the tutorial, I learned that I’d need to open a terminal and type some things on the command line. It’s an easy thing to do, but I wonder if it would be confusing to a new Linux user.

On the command line, I directed Ubuntu to download the Automatix package from a repository at beerorkid.com, and then to unpack and install the script. To start the script, I could click on Applications -> System Tools -> Automatix, or simply type “Automatix” in the terminal. Once running, Automatix got my permission to access Ubuntu repositories and check for some necessary packages in one window. Then, in another window, it showed me a list of all the packages it could install for me and what they contained. I selected the ones I wanted by clicking the check box next to them. I checked everything — what the heck, Automatix was doing all the work for me, and if something gets messed up, it wasn’t my fault!

Once I finally got them all selected and clicked “OK,” Automatix went to work doing whatever it needed to do to get my computer to a state of configuration nirvana. Things slowed down a bit when the script paused to ask for my root password, and it took me a minute to figure that out, because the request came from the first window, which was partially obscured by the second window. After I typed in my password, the script progressed, but stopped two more times to ask again, which I thought was strange since sudo usually remembers my root password for at least a few minutes. After I entered the password the third time, the script and its two windows exited unexpectedly. I didn’t get any kind of error message — everything just disappeared. I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to happen and Automatix had simply finished installing everything. But I read on the tutorial that some user input was required in order to install several of the applications. Not seeing any related troubleshooting information in the discussion thread, I decided to stop looking and just run the script again.

This time things went as they should; I entered my password once and the script went about downloading and installing all the packages I requested. At one point, the script halted because I had elected to install Nvidia drivers despite not having an Nvidia card on my laptop. I was able to circumvent that by canceling the operation. Automatix skipped the package and went on to the next without a hitch. Wine, the Windows compatibility application, was one of the largest packages to install, and it was the slowest, downloading from SourceForge at less than 1Kbps and taking more than half an hour to finish. I think Automatix should point to a repository with more bandwidth, such as ibiblio.org, where I was able to download Wine at 189Kbps.

After Wine was done, Automatix reminded me that I’d need to run a file called winecfg later on in order to setup and use Wine. Automatix still had more packages to install, though. Unfortunately, before it finished, another bug crawled out and threatened to ruin my fun. The script halted because it said I was running another instance of dpkg, the Debian package archive tool. Honestly, I wasn’t!

What’s a girl to do but start the script again? The problem was, I wasn’t sure exactly which applications hadn’t been installed yet — apparently, Automatix hadn’t been setting them up in the order listed on the selection screen. Rather than guess, I selected everything again — except the Nvidia drivers. Luckily, the script zipped through everything it had already done and quickly returned to what it had been working on before.

As Automatix gets closer to its end, it needs more user input. You can’t just walk away from it and come back when it’s done. I was surprised at how long it took to run the script in its entirety. Not even counting the two times I had to restart Automatix, it took about an hour and a half to run. When it finally finished, I put Automatix to the test, and it passed with an “A.”

This is when the payoff comes for having had the patience to make it through a time-consuming installation. Everything I needed worked just as it should with no further research, downloading, or tweaking. All the Firefox plugins worked; when I put a DVD in, Totem opened up and started playing it; I could share files using a Gnutella client or a BitTorrent client; Kino imported my digital video files directly through Firewire; and as a bonus, Automatix even installed OpenOffice.org and Thunderbird.

Automatix lives up to its reputation. It’s worth any time and small frustration it might take to get through the script. And it’s even worth that “over-the-shoulder” time you might spend with a new Linux user to walk them through it. I don’t see any reason why a beginner would not be delighted with Ubuntu after a magic touch from Automatix.