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Give an Internet Freedom Disk
An anonymous reader, perhaps the blogger himself, writes to tell us about a new blog aimed at getting non-techies excited over the idea of running from a Live CD. The blogger doesn't call it that, preferring instead "Internet Freedom Disk"; Linux is never mentioned. The submitter adds: "This is just a great gift to drop on your non-geek friends and potentially wake up a sleeping giant." Cheap, last-minute, and you can make them yourself. The blogger isn't selling anything; he provides links to Ubuntu and Knoppix Live CDs. Or pick your favorite.
It is the only disk that enables me watch CNN video, Yahoo! video, and videos on http://www.youtube.com/ and http://www.video.google.com/ and http://http//www.grouper.com with no tweaking whatsoever.
This disk also enabled me play Yahoo! games which means Java was [properly] installed. Sound and video worked great and the fonts for the first time, looked better, though more work was still needed on this front.
One thing I did not like was the CnR warehouse for it complained about my email address being invalid and complained again that the same email address had already been used!
The other complaint I have with Freespire is the fact that I could not customize my KDE to my liking. But overall, this Freespire distro is the best I have seen for the desktop in the Linux world.
yick im going to waive my mod points to post this little gem ftp://terabyteunlimited.com/burncdcc.zip
1 its freeware
2 all it does is burn isos
3 if you can't figure it out sell your computer
4 if you manage to make a coaster your drive is defective (or your box is "compromised")
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I tried giving away The Open CD (or something similar) to my students. This was a class of biology majors at a community college, so the geek quotient was higher than the general population, but a lot lower than slashdot. I got zero response. Zero interest. Not a single student ever even tried it. I think OpenOffice is a particularly lackluster thing to try to get ordinary people excited about, because they already have word. If they have a good income, they have a legal copy of Word; if they're starving students, they have a pirated copy. They already have tons of Word files on their computer, and no motivation to mess around seeing if OpenOffice will mangle the formatting or not. This is one of the realities we have to deal with: OSS is not an option for most people, for most tasks, because they're locked into proprietary formats.
OSS games also don't seem to impress people, for several possible reasons: (1) they're crude compared to commercial games, (2) in many cases, they don't work well with the video card, so you get poor performance, and (3) people are used to being able to play flash games for free. I hate to say it, but clubpenguin.com is a lot slicker than most Linux games. Similarly, people are used to getting all those Google AJAX apps for free, and they don't lie up at night worrying about whether Gmail is open-source.
Here is a similar project I've been working on to do a promotional CD of free textbooks. I haven't had much time to work on it since the semester started, however. (Yes, I know the link to theassayer.org is down -- DNS troubles, which should be fixed soon.)
Find free books.
Yeah, Damn Small Linux is good, but I prefer Puppy Linux because I've found it to be more easily customizable. Using Puppy Unleashed, I've made a custom version that includes the software I consider essential (vim, screen, sshfs, mplayer, mp3blaster, ratpoison, etc). Each of those is not available on the standard live-cd, but I added them to my custom version - and got them working the way I like - with a few hours of work. Most of that time was spent burning test CD-RW's to make sure that everything interacted correctly (elinks needs to know how to play nice with screen, ~/.bashrc needs to included vim specific variables, among other details).
Boot process (for my somewhat large ~85MB version) is under 1 min on the machine I most recently tested (a 1.4ghz athalon box with 512MB RAM). That is faster than the WinXP boot process for that machine. Several versions of Puppy fit on a 50MB buisiness card sized CD and load even faster.
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
You are both right.
While much of the KJV was translated from Greek and Hebrew there is definitely evidence of having translated from a Latin source (Mt 6.34, 1Cor 13, Is 14.12).
A truer example of a Bible translated from the original tongues is the Geneva Bible, for which I have the New Testament available for purposes of comparison.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Given that many full installable distros like Ubuntu require a long and complicated edits to configure connection to a WPA PSK AP, it seems a little optimisitc to assume these live CDs can be handed out with strong confidence that newbies, esp with wireless laptops will be able to boot and connect. I've used about 8 of them (from DSL to Knoppix) and while they're pretty good at detecting wired connections (although some recent wired LAN chipsets still don't get supported right away), I've rarely found wireles, esp with encryption to work without a lot of manual configuration - which is really self-defeating if a RO live CD makes you do it everytime. Much as I wish it were'nt true, Windows (Vista -for example) does an excellent job of finding wireless hdw, spotting an access point and correctly guessing the kind of encryption key the AP is looking for - which is ironic, since there's no such thing as a Windows live CD (except for PE which is really an installer boot environment). I don't believe Microsoft can see a licening model for live CD that works as long as CD/DVDs can be copied. (Maybe live CDs that HAVE to be connected to clock a charge-per-minute of run time :-))
So, when DSL can accurately detect and quickly configure wireless (and still run totally out of 128MB or more of RAM) I'll give out tons of these to newbies.