Slashdot Mirror

So I wanted to comment on this, having a few years experience in the retail/warehouse operations/inventory management space. On the barcode part. Be careful what barcode scanners you get. You want one that will support all the standard types, and spits the data to standard out. If it stores and forwards, or requires software drivers drop it. Also make sure to avoid any bacrode scanners that say they only work with a particular system. Touchscreens shouldn't be an issue. Linux,windows,dos,mac osx all support them. They present themselves to the system as a standard USB or PS2 mouse. Various buttons, but a bit of xorg.conf tweaking based on easily found online examples will setup the bindings for any additional functionality you may want beyond simple left button actions. You don't want a credit card reader. You want a mag stripe reader. Do all the processing of the mag stripe in software. Debit cards will be tricker. But you have to do some research and dev work yourself haha. :) Receipt printer is easy enough. I recommend creating an image and printing it, vs trying to interface with the endless proprietary drivers/languages of the barcode printers. I have written a fair amount of interface code for eltron printers, and regular dot matrix printers. Trust me, creating an image and sending it is easier. :) Thats all for now. I am easily reachable if you want more information. charles@thewybles.com is my e-mail. http://www.thewybles.com/~charles is my website. My resume focuses on my system operations/administration/engineering experience but I have done a fair amount of software engineering as well. I just don't want to work in that field any more and keep it more of a hobby.

Having reported problems to microsoft and worked with people who do, I can say that Microsofts response to security issues is prompt DEPENDING ON THE PRODUCT. For excel and exchange the issues were fixed quickly and quietly. I don't know about other products and haven't delt with them. Obviously if you look at my website and the Projects I am involved in you will see why I have reported things for these products.

Having reported problems to microsoft and worked with people who do, I can say that Microsofts response to security issues is prompt DEPENDING ON THE PRODUCT. For excel and exchange the issues were fixed quickly and quietly. I don't know about other products and haven't delt with them. Obviously if you look at my website and the Projects I am involved in you will see why I have reported things for these products.

I run an open source project that is building an exchange replacement. http://www.thewybles.com/~charles/oser is the project homepage. It will be highly available (supporting both hardware (cisco/webmux load balancers) and software based load balancing. Along with a whole host of other groupware functionality. I have done high availability e-mail solution deployments. I am in the SoCal area but am willing to travel if necessary. There are others who can help you as well. Your choice. My blog covers a lot of the progress of the project and details. I would be happy to work with you to complete this task. Just e-mail me and we can work out an arrangement.

There is no real exchange replacement that is 100% open source. My project is looking to change that. http://www.thewybles.com/~charles/oser is the website.

Do you need to look for alternate hosting? I am also about to release a morphix based live cd of my project. I plan to use SF to host it. Morphix uses SF for hosting of ISOS. I don't know why you can't. Here is my setup: I use my own host for my project website (http://www.thewybles.com/~charles/oser) and SF for bugs/e-mail/source control etc. I use my own host so I can have raw level access to the server logs which SF doesn't give you. But everything else uses SF. They have taken all the hard work out of project management.

or checkout OSER - Open Source Exchange Replacement

http://sourceforge.net/projects/oser/

http://www.thewybles.com/oser/help/roadmap/systems .html