Free Software & The Queensland Flood Crisis

[Nathaniel]

Hello,

Firstly I'd like to say Hello to all the list members as this is my first
post here. I've been using Linux for 2 yrs now & have been totally Windows
free for the past 18 months (& loving it!). I've mainly used Ubuntu starting
with 8.04 but have also ventured away to Fedora, Crunchbang and Linux Mint
for the wife's laptop. Ubuntu seems to fit me best & I'm currently very
happy with 10.04.

Now onto why I started this post.

I have been following the shocking events in Queensland for the past several
weeks. I'd like to extend my thoughts and best wishes for everyone on this
list and your families that may be caught up in the terrible floods. I hope
your all safe, dry & that the Linux box is high enough to survive :-)

Anyway whilst I was reading about the terrible floods it occurred to me that
Free Software could play a part in the rebuilding phase of Queensland.
Peoples homes and businesses have been devastated by the flood waters and
the most important thing for them is getting back to work to provide an
income to rebuild their lives.

Windows and Ms Office cost a huge amount if you have to buy them off the
shelf and especially at this time when money is tight to non-existent it is
just another expense to add to an already long list.

So my suggestion is this. If we could get some cd's burnt with Ubuntu on
them and pass them around to people such as businesses, charities,schools &
families that have lost their computers to flood damage it would help them
to get up and running again as well as being a great promotional exercise
for Ubuntu and Free Software in general.

Ubuntu already comes with everything needed to start work, Firefox,
Evolution and OpenOffice. To further simplify things, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS could
be used instead of the latest 10.10. Then simply set Synaptic to only
download LTS updates thereby minimising the number of update notifications
they would have to deal with.

I really hope we can make the most of this opportunity both for the people
of Queensland and for Ubuntu and the Open Source community.

-- 
Regards

Nathaniel
(Perth, WA)
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