As per the site title, this blog is all about Christians and open source software, and how to use OSS in church and Christian organisations. We've discussed introducing and ultimately converting your church to OSS, and asked you what OSS you use in your church.

After blogging about these things, I thought it might be a good idea to write up a How To for those folks who use Linux on a regular basis, and want to set up a central Linux server at their church office.

My server setup at home works pretty well, so I am going to tell you how to make a similar setup.

The Details

• DHCP for assigning IP addresses to computers on the network
• DNS for caching of domain names, and serving the local server's internal domain name
• Samba for filesharing
• CUPS for a shared printer
• Arno's IPTables Firewall
• Apache HTTP server for web based app(s)
• Jethro PMM for membership management

Instead of me writing an article, I thought it might be time to ask those who read this blog about their church's open source usage. So, in no particular order, here are some questions:

• Does your church use open source software?
• Does it use OSS on Windows, or a full OSS stack (e.g. Linux/*BSD)?
• What open source applications does your church use?
• Does your pastor know he's using OSS?
• If you use OSS other than the usual suspects (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc), then what do you use it for?

At a guess, I'll say that most churches are probably in the "we use Firefox on Windows" category.

This is the last part in the series, I promise! If you haven't done so already, I recommend you read parts one, two, three, four and five first.

In the previous 5 parts I have set out a rough guideline for how to introduce open source software into your church. Unfortunately, most of the time you won't be able to go all the way to a total open source setup, so be prepared for that. It will most likely take a few years to make headway beyond getting your pastor to use Firefox or Chrome.

The easiest way to introduce new software and IT systems would be if you are the IT director, or in some other position of influence in your church. Sadly, the fact of the matter is that if you don't have some sort of clout in your church, no one is going to listen to you. In most churches, getting into a position of influence takes a few years, so you'll need to have perseverence and a willingness to play a large role in helping out in your church.

If you are successful in converting your church to OSS, please let everyone know about it, especially us here at Christians in Open Source Software. Make sure you blog about it. We would love to hear about how your church is using open source software.

This is the fifth post in a series on introducing open source software into your church. If you haven't already, read parts one, two, three and four first.

The previous 4 parts of this series dealt with migrating to various pieces of open source software which runs on both Linux and Windows. In this part I'd like to deal with the final big thing: a full-on migration to Linux.

This is the fourth post in a series on introducing open source software into your church. If you haven't already, read parts one, two and three first.

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when migrating to open source software in your church is moving from one e-mail client to another. There are few things more challenging than getting someone to use a new e-mail client - the only exception I can think of is moving people away from Microsoft Office.

This is the third post in a series on introducing open source software into your church. If you haven't already, read parts one and two first.

Last week we talked about introducing open source worship presentation software into your church. Once that has been running smoothely for a few weeks, it's probably a good time to explain to your pastor what open source software is all about.

Disclaimer: I am the project leader of OpenLP, but I have tried to be unbiased in my article.

Have you ever been in a church which just got a data projector to use for its services, and then all they do is use PowerPoint, even though you can see it's not suited for the job? Have you ever wondered if there are other solutions?

Perhaps you've investigated other solutions and come across some commercial applications, but you find it difficult to cough up $400 for this application.

As an open source fanatic, I often feel the urge to just jump in and install Linux and other open source software on all the computers in the church. Sadly, this doesn't usually have the desired effect ("Oh wow! Thank you! We've saved $$$$$ per year, thanks to Open Source Software!"), and more often than not it has the opposite effect: driving everyone back to proprietary software.

Over the next couple of blog posts, I am going to blog about how I think we approach the issue of open source in the church. My suggestion is to do it in baby steps, little by little, one app at a time. My first post will recommend how to get the ball rolling.

This post has been migrated from http://christianoss.wordpress.com/

One of my pet peeves is those OpenOffice.org Impress or Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that folks do in churches. I've seen too many half-hearted efforts in the 28 years I've been in church.