[clug] RE: Open Source promo stall

[Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]

Darren Freeman wrote:

On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 12:36, Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au wrote:

> > That's an idea. Have a bootable distro that sets itself up as a
> > CD burning kiosk. Insert blank CD. Click on product you want.
> > Wait for chosen product to pop out. That could be almost self service
> > with a honesty jars for donations to whatever charity they agree with.

> I don't see how that works. Do you mean the bootable kiosk contains the
> products to be burned? I thought the single-CD bootable distro *was* the
> product to be burned. And I wouldn't be surprised if Knoppix could burn
> itself without needing a hard disc for storage ;) As long as there's two
> drives.

Yes, it's a bit more involved than that. I was thinking a second drive that
had a selection of useful ISOs on it, something to boot from that fired up
a UI that let you dump the ISOs onto a CD burner. Would be a pretty cool
facility for a computer fair to offer. Say:

	- Red Hat
	- SuSE
	- Mandrake
	- Knoppix
	- Open Office (Windows, Linux & Mac)
	- Mozilla (Windows, Linux & Mac)
	- IPCop or Gibraltar
	- Gimp (Windows & Linux)


> The honesty jars - how do people specify where the money goes? Wouldn't
> it be easier to just make the honesty jars pay for the CDs, and lunch
> for the volunteers, and any excess goes to
> EFA/FSF/the_next_stall_we_run?

Probably. I was thinking that donating to charity is usually publicity-worthy.
FSF is a logical choice, but something warm and fuzzy would be nice as well.

> However creating a distro distro sounds cool ;) Maybe it connects to a
> central site with every distro and caches the most recent burns. So even

Meta-Linux?  :o)

> a laptop plugged into a school network becomes a distro kiosk, off a
> boot CD. You can cache ISOs on the existing FAT32 partition and leave
> Winblowz intact. For as long as people stick to the cached ISOs the

That's better than what I was thinking (sticking an extra drive in).
Defintely cached rather than trying to suck stuff over the wire.
Pressed CDs are most convenient, but date pretty quickly (I only
downloaded Open Office 1.0.3-1 two weeks ago)

Antti