[H-GEN] A promo project for HUMBUG and Linux.

[Carl Adams]

I've been participating in the HUMBUG list for about a year. Being a  
pensioner without a car, my disposable income is minimal, and getting to  
meetings a trial, so I'm a mostly anonymous presence. I'm also a long-term  
Linux enthusiast, and have mulled over innumerable ideas for its  
promotion. Perhaps the best way to boost HUMBUG membership would be to  
define a project with immediate social relevance. For a couple of years  
now I've been of the opinion that there's an opportunity here going  
begging. I refer to:

1. The number of perfectly usable older PCs that are literally thrown out  
every day.
2. The ongoing interest and concern over Inet access for children.

It would be a relatively straight-forward exercize to draw up a project  
specification for a distro respin that installed as a network firewall,  
caching server, and NAS. With a well-designed browser interface, an old  
machine could easily be fitted with a terabyte HDD and configured as a  
single Inet access point for a household, along with time and login  
specific surfing permissions, caching of child-friendly sites so that the  
young ones don't actually need to be on the 'Net (they only think they are  
when they're accessing cached sites) and IP monitoring of all outgoing  
connections. It would have several advantages over commercial offerings,  
especially complete configurability and superior price/performance ratio.

Once up and running, this could not only serve as a valuable  
promo/membership tool for HUMBUG, but could be used in the wider community  
to promote Linux generally.

If there's any interest in this, I'd be happy to post a preliminary spec  
on my site for discussion, along with a forum etc to build a preliminary  
project database.