Tell us your ideas for new and improved Freedom Toaster features, design and functionality.

I used the toaster at UCT this weekend to get a set of Debian CD's. I found the user interface for burning extremely confusing, and I'm not a novice. The things that I found confusing were as follows :
1. It is not clear whether one should use the open/close button on the writer, or whether one interacts only through the screen (or if it doesn't matter).
2. The "retry" and "done" buttons appear after the CD is complete and the tray has opened; what is their purpose ? I put in a new CD and press "done"; the tray closes and opens again and shows a "toast" button. Press that and the tray opens and closes twice and then eventually gets going.
3. It wasn't clear what is being burned to a CD at the moment - I would suggest a box under the CD icon that lists the title of the disc currently in progress. I wound up with two copies of one disc, and I still don't know how.

My main suggestion for improvement would be to have step-by-step instructions appropriate to the current status on the screen at all times. Something like "Put blank CD in first drive and touch the "toast" icon on screen; when toasting is complete, the drive will open and a "done" and "retry" icon will appear....." etc. etc.

Another suggestion is that I think the word "toast", while in keeping with the theme, is not a standard term for the process. "Burn" or "write" might cause less confusion - remember we are trying to appeal to people who are not necessarily computer literate, nor first language English speakers.

Fritz

Fritz Meissner

What would be nice is that, if somebody keeps their toaster up to date with the latest ISO's, if they could share the /srv/isos tree on the net (perhaps get Internet Solutions to mirror it), so that it will not be such a mission on a first setup, or when packages are updated.

We could just set up our toasters to rsync with that server/ mirror, and they will automatically all be up to date with the latest ISO's.

Does anyone know if these comments are noticed? Some of these suggestions are rather good ones, and I'm sure most of us agree that there's a lot of effort put into the freedom toasters, but I don't see any replies / feedback on the site about the suggestions for improvements?

I used the Freedom Toaster at CSIR today, and while I love the idea, the branding and the interface, I have a few suggested improvements:

1. It's much slower than I was expecting. Burning 1 CD the max speed was 18.4x. Burning 3 CDs concurrently the speed slowed to 6x.
2. You should be able to toast more than one thing concurrently! If I'm organising an event where there would be people exposed to FOSS, I'd love to use the F.T. to churn out 20 Ubuntu and OpenCDs to give away. At the moment you can only do that one at a time, and then it still could be faster.
3. There were a couple of times that the system "lost the plot", and while the toasting continued there was no visual indication that it was happening. This was especially a problem when toasting a 4CD set, because there was no notification to put in the last CD (hacked around this by leaving burned cds in trays and starting again). This happened mostly when I clicked on different tabs at the top of the screen because the "not busy toasting state" text was more interesting!
4. There should be more stimulating information to look at while you are waiting for your toast, or to inform you about FOSS if you just happen to walk past and are interested. Offline Wikipedia, or Gutenberg would be a good start.
5. I appreciate that the "slideshow" information should be pro-FOSS, but some of it is too far on the "FOSS-can-do-no-wrong" scale. I'm referring to comments like "sometimes there's problems loading word documents with heavy formatting, but this is more the fault of the writer than anything else.", which are not very helpful. Let the quality of the product speak for itself. Be objective about its relative strengths and weaknesses.
6. Just a last point about ergonomics. Firstly, a chair would be nice! This would be useful to sit on while you wait, but also to have something to put the CDs on while you write labels for them. I found myself crouching on the floor, pressing against my knee, and trying several other positions that probably led people to believe this was some new digital yoga kiosk!

Hi, Jason i had a chat with you two weeks back about disk five burn failure. this has been a persisting at the toaster in EL.

Can you also look at providing us with a less restrictive access institution, becuase that other week they had stikes, now the lecturer is on leave and next week they are closed for spring holidays.

The other thing can you send me posters that i can advertise the toaster around EL.

www.oyo.co.za

What about an option to burn just one particular disk from a distro?

With most distro's a minimal install only requires the first disk.

Also if someone had a 14 disk distro and they damage cd no. 14
they would not need to re-burn the entire distro...

Add a graph on the toaster that shows how popular the toaster is (how many burns, what OSs are popular). This would be one of the "screen saver" pages.

Hello again,

i just posted some software to include on the toaster & then some other improvements came to me.

What about usb, ethernet, firewire, sata & wireless access?

Any of those would allow getting the software without having to burn a cd (usb memory stick, external hard drive, laptop, pda?... installations from hard drive are quite faster as well)

Add an ftp server and one could update or install his laptop directly from the toaster.

Laptops equipped with WiFi are becoming quite affordable so the demand for this type of solutions should increase. Maybe a power plug would come in handy also in case you want to please those users.

About WiFi & similar solutions: they seem to be the best response to the internet problem you're experiencing down there in South Africa.

At the moment new WiFi cards offer at least 54Mbps as maximum bandwidth. This technology has become very cheap and is evolving a lot lately with WiMax & other new standards pushing the limits of available wireless bandwidth. The price of a WiFi card is less than what we pay here for 1 month of a basic broadband connection (i.e. 3Mbps).

Here in Belgium a independent study has concluded that wireless communications combined to opensource technologies would be the most effective & affordable way to get Africa online & increase it's productivity.

Bombolong {African drum used to transmit messages} is an Non-Profit Organisation whose object is the establishment of information systems in developing countries via development and deployment of low cost wireless communication networks using the accessible and renewable energy resources.

They manage to send WiFi up to 35Km using a 1W amplified signal. One of their projects this year is to create a free wireless network covering whole Burundi.

Though this information might be of interest to you guys, in case you want to promote a similar system in South-Africa you might want to get in touch with this organisation as they have given it a big thought already... jch@jabber.reseaucitoyen.be This is the email of the project's creator.

Best wishes from Brussels

the toaster doesn't say which version of the distros it has. (cape town)
this will be a problem when you update the distros cuz people won't know unless they check this site first.