A bootable business card (BBC) card is a CD-ROM that has been cut, pressed, or printed to the size and shape of a business card (designed to fit a wallet or pocket). Alternative names for this form factor include "credit card," "hockey ring," and "wallet size". The cards are designed to hold about 50 MB. Business cards CD-ROMs are generally used for commercial product demos, delivered to potential customers, and are given at trade shows.
Although the term "bootable business card" can be applied to any bootable CD-ROM in a business card form factor, it almost always refers to one that contains a compact Linux distribution that generally contains a set of diagnostic and rescue tools and/or system demo of special packages.
Video Bootable business card
History
In 1999, Linuxcare employee Duncan MacKinnon proposed the idea of ​​producing and distributing such cards for the upcoming trade show. He and his team of volunteers (fellow employees) coined the term "bootable business cards".
Inaugural version is available at the first LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose, California. The initial press press produced 10,000 copies. Most of them are given on the show and sent to Linux user groups in the following months.
Because the project consists of open source and free software, and the idea is very interesting and simple, a number of other BBC Linux are quickly becoming available.
The first derivative is produced by the Irish Linux User Group. Over the years, most of the original Linux creators of BBCcare left the company, but continue to work on projects now called LNX-BBC.
At least one Red Hat Linux package includes a system rescue CD in the business card form factor.
Many derivatives and clones from the BBC have mushroomed. Almost all of this goes on PC. Limited success has been achieved on BBC and Live CD on other computing platforms.
The initial version of BBC Linuxcare is a collection of packages that have been compiled for other distributions (such as Debian and Red Hat Linux from which the subset of files is copied into the directory from which the BBC is "mastered" (ISO image 9660 image) has been built).
Building all the mini-distributions from source code is the main task of the LNX-BBC project (which is made up of original Linuxcare members with contributors and other volunteers). The first version of the LNX-BBC that is independent of Linuxcare is 1,618 (the number suggested by Seth Schoen team members, the approximate golden ratio, or phi (?), And an award to Donald Knuth who uses a more precise approach in succession from " for its TeX typesetting system version).
Starting with version 2.0, all LNX-BBC discs are built entirely from the source code using the GAR system. This version is used by the Free Software Foundation as their membership card (awarded sponsor members for their donations).
Recently, 50 MB Damn Small Linux can be placed on the BBC. There is also a "BBC" release of other free operating systems like FreeBSD.
Maps Bootable business card
Operation
The key to a bootable business card is that it runs entirely from CD and system memory (RAM), as some versions of "Live" CD from Linux have been done for years. One just puts the CD into the drive, turn on the computer and make sure that the CD drive is selected to boot before the hard drive.
After booting, the operating system runs from the CD and exits the system RAM. Since the name card form factor has a small capacity, Linuxcare developers usually choose to use a compressed file system. This allows a typical BBC to contain about 100 megabytes of software for only about 50 megabytes of disk space.
The original BBC and most clones and their derivatives will scan the system for known file systems, automatically "mounting" it in read-only mode. This makes the file system on the local hard disk accessible while minimizing the risk of unintentional corruption, deletion or other damage to files on local drives.
Typical BBCs contain networked networks, backup and data recovery utilities, which are therefore honored by Linux system administrators as a rescue tool.
Many BBCs use cloop (compressed loopback) drivers that provide compressed read-only filesystems for Linux. Of course they usually have some system memory (RAM) that is configured as ramdisk (or maybe some RAM disk). This usually leaves the dedicated CD-ROM drive for the duration of system usage. However, some BBCs make larger ramdisk and copy the entire system from CD, thus making the drive available to other CDs or DVDs. This is useful because some PCs have only one CD or DVD drive.
After boot, the system provides a UNIX/Linux command line command (generally as root user). Some also provide some very concise graphical user interface tools (GUIs). LNX-BBC includes a small X (X Window System) server and a web browser named BrowseX (among other tools).
In essence, most of the BBC is a rescue and diagnostic tool for professional experts, and normal user operation is better served by Direct CD distribution.
Alternative
A number of Linux distributions run from Live CDs, operating in a similar way to bootable business cards, mainly including Knoppix and Ubuntu distributions. Similarly, Linux distributions can often be configured to run from a USB flash drive, or similar media, such as a floppy disk. Some can be booted over the network.
Risk
Bootable business cards can host malware as bootable media is an easy way for malware to infect systems and unsuspecting users are easily tempted by their novelty. It is also difficult for average users to specify their content before booting.
See also
- Shaped CD
- Live CD
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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