Great Linux Give Away
 

Here is a suggestion to make this thread more succesful in two parts.

1. Give away copies of your favorite Linux distribution to your friends, co-workers, schools, small businesses, etc with this site as a go to place for questions to be answered.

2. Answer questions posted on this site.

Two birds with one stone....

Is this thread not successful already? Not sure how me dishing out DVDR's will affect this thread at all.

I think this is a great idea myself

I've been giving away CDs with a distro on them since... well, since FreeBSD 2.2.3
I'd say it's been about 5% effective. It has, in general, increased awareness.

I started giving out USB thumbdrives with Knoppix and Ubuntu on them this year. Those have been a bit more successful - but the real win came from giving out some PenDriveLinux thumbdrives. I gave out 3 and all 3 were instant hits.

My point? CDs (while cheap and easy) seem to fall off people's To Do list pretty quickly.
Distros they can run on top of Windows (literally - yay Qemu :) ) has the most remarkable effect. The new ones that function as a liveUSB/kqemu image have been really impressive.

People also don't tend to simply toss a USB key, perhaps recognizing the value and cost.

My favourite way to distribute linux is to show small orgs how their old desktops can be useful again as servers. Once they see some of the fun things you can do, they start asking about other possibilities.

That's a really good point - community service is definitely one of the best parts, and turning systems from the 'discard' pile into productive systems is always nice :)

To build on that, one of the major things I do professionally is help major companies convert from various proprietary systems to Linux - it's almost staggering how much money they save. Licenses and such really do make a big difference.

I have a growing collection of various Live and Install CD's for most Distros, only BSD and a few distros are missing. I often take them with me when someone calls on me for technical help, ever since mum decides to let word about me get around, effectively making me local tech support.

Sometimes when I have to use something like Knoppix to fix their computer, they'll comment on it, and sometimes I give them one of my LiveCD's to use (I can always burn another) for themselves. That's always been the easiest way I've had of introducing someone to it.

erm sure, send me few if you don't mind. :-)