Our landlord has installed a new heater for us, which as of December 20 is working! So this winter you can volunteer for Freegeek Chicago in comfort. Orientation may be a bit shout-ier, because that thing is loud!

We see increased sales traffic during the winter months, and for good reason: a Freekbox makes a great holiday gift. At $40, you can buy your spouse/ gf/ bf/ bff/ brother/ sister (hopefully those are all different people in your family) a computer that'll introduce him/ her to the wonderful linux operating system. A $40 computer is a great option for doing homework, browsing the Internet and getting e-mail, and running simple and free linux games. Already have a computer that does all that for you? Why not set it up a SAMBA file server to share your music with your roommates? Or run a dedicated router and firewall with the excellent and free ipcop software? A $40 can do some pretty cool stuff.

We also have some laptops around, starting at $65 for a laptop that matches our Freekbox specification , running up to around $150 for a Pentium 4-based system that would suffice for audio recording, streaming video, watching DVD movies, and almost anything else you could want a PC to do.