The Freedom Toaster

For all my open source people, here's a li'l piece of interesting information. Straight from the creators of Ubuntu - Linux for Human beings, a south african Linus distro based on the Debian Kernel built by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African Entrepreneur who founded Thawte Consulting which he sold to Verisign in December 1999 and amongst other things was the first Tourist in Space, comes The Freedom Toaster.

The Freedom Toaster is a conveniently located, self-contained ‘Bring 'n Burn' facility, where users bring their own blank discs and make copies of the open source software they require or in lay terms, an open source vending machine where all the currency you need are your blank CDs, for my Nigerian peeps, this is the Open Source equivalent to CitiServe Refresh. The concept is to put Open Source software within easy reach of the people owing to bandwith issues that make it a majot issue trying to downlaod 650MB or larger ISOs of the net.

Seeing as it's the brain child of a South African it's only natural that at present all the Toaster boxes are located in SA. The Software included in the Toaster are largely various Linux Distros and other software like

• Firemonger CD (Full version)
• OpenCD 2.0
• OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 (platform independent)
• Gutenberg 2003 CD and DVD

Seeing as here in Nigeria we always have the same bandwith issues coupled with the incessant power outages, no thanks to PHCN, it'd be a cool idea to have one or more here in Nigeria. I took the liberty of posting a Toaster Request on the Fredom Toaster site here. You can check it out an maybe add your wn posts, maybe the more the posts from here the higher our chances of actually getting one or more. Registering first might be a good idea.

T'would be cool if we actually did get some so let's keep our fingers crossed.

That's all folks.