[TriLUG] Linux Point of Sale

[Aaron Bockover]

Hello,

I am going to be building a few systems for a small retail book store in
Raleigh. 

They are looking to have a main POS system with a cash drawer, receipt
printer, normal/inkjet/laser printer, credit card swipey thingy, and
barcode scanner. This system should record all transactions on the main
server that I will be building, preferably over NFS.

Every thing needs to obviously be Linux based, so I'm looking for any
existing POS software solutions that run under Linux. I'd be open to
nice ncurses interfaces or something atop X -- X, GTK, QT -- don't care.
The software should work with all the necessary devices. The thermal
receipt printer (IBM SureMark 4160) works over serial ... I can "echo
'Test' > /dev/ttyS0" and it prints, so that should be easy. It also has
a check reader/impact printer for filling out checks, but I'm not sure
how this works. I haven't been able to print to that. (If anyone knows
-- I'd love some help here too!). I presume the barcode scanner is just
PS/2, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Anywhoo -- if anyone knows of any software, or wants to comment on
similar setups, I would greatly appreciate the help/advice.

Thanks!
--Aaron