I'd have some misgivings about giving away home-made distro CDs to newbies. The last thing you want is to have someone's first experience of a free OS being a borked install process caused by dodgy media. It's not so essential for something like the OpenCD to be bit-perfect.
home-made CD's are just fine, as long as you don't use the cheapest possible blanks and burn them at 52x! Get a decent brand disk and burn them at about 12x (less if you can stand it) because some (usually older) drives can't boot or read them reliably otherwise.
Books
* Three Novels by Cory Doctorow * Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams * We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by Dan Gillmor * Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig * Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing * Free Software Magazine - Issues 0-6
Audio
* Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig (and friends) * LugRadio - 2 episodes I'm not sure this is a first impression we want to make :)
* The Dangers of Software Patents by Richard Stallman * Copyright vs Community in the age of computer Networks by Richard Stallman
Video From the Creative Commons Project
* Creative Commons - Get Creative * Creative Commons - Remix Culture * Building on the Past * CC Brazil
From archive.org
* Richard Stallman - Rome - Interview (4-1-2003)
Some great ideas here; I think we need some software promo videos like the one for Tremulous too.. http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tremulous/tremulous-promo-II.avi?download Anybody know if there are more like this?