[clug] RE: Open Source promo stall

[Darren Freeman]

On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 13:42, Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au wrote:
> Darren Freeman wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 12:36, Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au wrote:
> 
> 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:

If we knew someone with a DVD burner we could burn a few "distro distro"
DVDs which contain several compressed ISOs and some ISOs of free
software collections for Win/Mac (the Linux version would be pointless
as everybody already has them with their distro, or knows where to get
it). The distro distro would be based on Knoppix and could boot to a
lightweight GUI that lets the user choose what to burn. We could call it
the Free Distro Disc or similar.

> 	- Red Hat
> 	- SuSE
> 	- Mandrake
> 	- Knoppix
> 	- Open Office (Windows, Linux & Mac)
> 	- Mozilla (Windows, Linux & Mac)
> 	- IPCop or Gibraltar
> 	- Gimp (Windows & Linux)
- and burn a copy of itself of course ;) (if you had a DVD burner)

> > 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.

FSF *is* warm and fuzzy =) They fight for the forces of good against
evil, that's good enough for me! Plus I'm sure they love puppies.

> > 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)

Cute! But it shouldn't be Linux-specific in its title if it's got tons
of non-Linux stuff on it (like GNU/OpenOffice/Mozilla). If there's room,
whack on some bootable toolboxes and a BSD or three ;) (got a 10GB DVD
anyone? ;)

How about FUD, the Freedom United Disc.

> > 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)

Certainly having a distro that comes crammed with ISOs on a DVD, *and*
knows when they are out of date and gets fresh ISOs for the local cache,
would be the best solution I think. It does require a DVD-ROM in
addition to the burner though, but a combo drive would be OK if it used
RAM / loopback off FAT32 to store the system, and cached the ISOs from
the DVD to the hard disc if you elect to remove the DVD.

> Antti

Have fun,
Darren