Which CD to burn enmasse for ITEC? (was Re: Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 5 now available)

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Fri, 9/5/08, Billy Crook <billycrook at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 17:29, Leo Mauler
> <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > And on another note, I'm getting ready 
> > to burn a spindle of Linux CDs for ITEC.  
> > Should I wait until October and then burn 
> > one of the newer alpha images, or get 
> > started now on the "stable" Ubuntu 8.04 
> > LTS image?

> You're going to sit at home, and burn a complete 
> spindle of disks all to one distro.  And what if 
> people want something other than the one image 
> you burned.  If you try to guess how many of what 
> you'll need, there's no way you'll get it right.  
> Maybe burn a couple of each of the top 5 distros' 
> stable releases as a buffer, 

Well, I've got 50 blank CDs (right now), Ubuntu is the easiest Linux distro, and we'll be talking to a lot of people who may have heard about Linux but never used it before, and who aren't going to want to spend a lot of time uber-customizing their Linux installation.

We can tell people about all the other distros, but frankly I'm not all that keen to tell people about any distro other than Ubuntu, for the simple reason that I don't like the other distros very much.  What we need in the booth is a passion for Linux, and I'm not going to be as passionate about Fedora or Gentoo as I am going to be about Ubuntu.

> and bring a couple "Freedom Toaster"s:
> 
> http://www.freedomtoaster.org/
>
> I don't see why you'd have to actually build a
> stand like on the site.  Just run the software 
> on a laptop with a burner.  CD burners are FAST
> these days, and the few seconds someone would 
> have to wait for a disc could be spent telling 
> them what is actually *on* the disk, and why 
> they shouldn't just throw it away when they get 
> home and find out it's not a freeware or sample 
> version of some expensive, proprietary windows 
> program.  It'd make the burning process itself
> a cool Linux thing to show off.

While I agree that burning onsite is cool, the faster you burn the more likely you will have CD errors, and slow burns mean trying to keep 50 people waiting around at our booth for 20 minutes or more each.  If I burn all 50 at home I can test all 50 before coming out, and replace the few that do end up as coasters.  If I burn all 50 at ITEC, we could be sending home 50 cheap *coasters* instead of 50 Linux CDs.

Now what *does* make sense is to make 50 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS discs, and then bring along a demo PC (like I always do) with a CD Burner and a hard drive containing other Linux CD ISOs, and burn the other ISOs people may want.  They can grab a i386 Ubuntu Linux CD right away, or stick around to find out that there are 64bit Linux ISOs and "uber-coolness" Gentoo ISOs, and even 50MB DamnSmallLinux ISOs for any size computer.  If they want a non-standard ISO, they may be willing to hang around a bit longer to get one.