The public libraries in several Danish municipalities are in the process of switching their audience PCs from Windows to Ubuntu.

They needed a central administration system to manage it, and Canonical's Landscape product was unacceptable for them; they needed the system to be completely free/open source, and Canonical's licensing when running Landscape as software-as-a-service was too expensive. The available free alternatives are either too technical for library staff, or they don't support Debian-based systems well.

In response, we created "BibOS Admin", a completely new administration system for all Debian-like systems. It enables users to remotely manage, maintain and upgrade PCs and run arbitrary, centrally defined scripts on them. The system is designed to be easy to use for non-technical staff who can rely on a set of pre-defined scripts, which should be set up as part of the setup for each organization (source code available here: https://github.com/magenta-aps/bibos_admin).

In the talk, I will discuss the technical and organizational challenges of building a new management from scratch in collaboration with the public libraries in Aarhus and Silkeborg, who kindly funded the effort.