[PLUG] Distro downloads 'n stuff

[John Jason Jordan]

Another scintillating afternoon at Free Geek has ended with another
more or less successful Clinic. Lots and lots of people, so if someone
is promoting the Clinic, your work is paying off. Keep doing it!

In consideration of the issues of Denis' need for a CD of Gutsy
Alternate and my idiocy in deleting my copy of it, I been thinking
about distros and the Clinic. Some thoughts:

1) There are a ton of distros, many with multiple versions. There are
more than a dozen just for each version of Ubuntu.

2) It never fails that the one that someone needs is the one I left at
home.

3) Bandwidth at Free Geek is not good enough to download an entire
distro in the time allotted.

4) It turns out that I have a 60 GB USB hard drive that I am not using. 

In consideration of the above, I have decided to dedicate the 60 GB
hard drive to the Clinic. It will live in a box that I always bring
with me to the Clinic. I will populate it with the latest downloads of
all popular distros and keep them on it for a couple of years. At the
Clinic we can then just burn a CD of whatever someone needs in a few
minutes. I have pretty good bandwidth at home, and torrents can run
unattended on my desktop. My real main computer is my laptop, so it's
not a big deal if my desktop is downloading ISOs.

Having said that, I know there are distros that I should maintain on
the disk, but I don't know which ones. Considering its popularity, I
certainly plan on maintaining all versions of Ubuntu. But what else do
people think I should have on it? Puppy? DSL? Fedora? Others? 

It was also suggested at the Clinic that I could maintain an ad hoc
repository on it as well. However, I countered that such might take way
more space than is available. But maybe a minimalist approach would be
doable. Comments from y'all on this idea are also welcome.