[dleslie]

I used to order boxes of Ubuntu CDs, when they still shipped them for free, and would hand them out to students at University; the pitch that it had a full free office-compatible suite and a C compiler was enough to get people to readily pick up discs.

[racl101]

I remember my first year of Uni having to go to the lab just to find a Sun work station (running Red Hat) so I could do my comp sci assignments and hope that there was one available otherwise I'd have to make the trek to the building again. During the winter months this trek was arduous.

It was so great in my 2nd year after learned about Ubuntu, figuring out how to install it on my Windows PC and being able to dual boot and then being able to do my assignments by connecting via SSH. Was able to do my assignments quicker and from the comfort of my rented basement (far away from campus).

And it was even better to just be able to experiment on my own laptop and not worry about screwing things up on the campus workstation.

There's so much good stuff available to make learning programming quicker but I look fondly on those early '2000 years because it makes me appreciate how far Linux and FOSS has come along.

[dleslie]

... SFU had Sun Workstations running Red Hat. They replaced the Solaris machines. Did you go to SFU?

[amatecha]

Boxes?! Nice. I still have a handful of those old Ubuntu live CDs for a couple different architectures. Pretty cool lil piece of computing history now, I guess. Not sure I really "converted" anyone to use Linux, but it got a few people interested to be sure!

[dleslie]

Yup! I'd set the quantity to 50 or 100 in their order form, and usually receive around 25 to 60. Never was a consistent amount, but it was always enough to hand out.

[amatecha]

haha, that's awesome! I think by the time I realized you could request free CDs, most of the distros (I can't even remember which) started limiting it to just a couple at a time. Still super cool though!