Seneca Freedom Toaster

[Mig21]

Hello

I would like to tell you about one of the projects I was involved in, hoping it may peak your interest and get you to share your ideas. Yes, I registered just for this, I do hope noone will mind.

We at the Linux Club at our school (Seneca College, in Toronto, Canada) built a Freedom Toaster. It's a kiosk that will burn open source stuff on the user's blank disk for free.

It took ~4 months to build and a lot of people were involved but it worked out alright. The software I chose to be most relevant to the curriculum: Open SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenCD, Knoppix, and Free DOS. Yes I heard someone still uses DOS around here, but really there was simply nothing better.

This is what it looks like: http://cdot.senecac.on.ca/projects/t...ry-front-1.jpg

We put the toaster in the library (there is also a huge computer lab there) so it's got maximum exposure. It's got logging enabled so we would know what the most popular choices are, but there is no parser for the log file so I won't share it with you - it's rather verbose.

The software I wrote in python (because I wanted to learn it, not because it's very good) and it's dead easy to use. It's GPL-ed of course. The artwork (in Illustrator format) is also available from the website under a Creative Commons licence.

I would like to spread the word about this thing. It's great fun to build, it helps spread open source and it can be as cheap or as expensive as you like - all you need is a computer with a CD burner, everything else is a bonus.

The website is a great resource if you're thinking of building one - there is the proposal (how we got funding), photos and explanation about bulding it, software, artwork.

If anybody knows how to advertise this around the internet please share! I almost feel bad that only my school has one it's the first of the kind outside of South Africa, where the idea came from.

Thanks!

[Freston]

What a great idea!

I dunno much about Internet marketing strategy, but perhaps you can ask the people using your machine to put a referance to the Freedom Toaster in their sigs when they sign up for fora?

[techieMoe]

That's pretty cool. I actually wish I could buy audio CDs this way.

[smolloy]

That musts have been a lot of fun to build. Cool idea.