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New Business Card Rescue CDs

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the linux-in-my-pocket dept.

Linuxcare has introduced version 1.2 of their business card-sized rescue disks, which now contain 140 MB of recovery tools, Debian install capabilities, the X Window System, PCMCIA support, and ssh. From the picture they look pretty cool, too. I remember seeing the business card CDs at a COMDEX a couple of years ago, but this is easily the best use I've seen for them, and is a needed improvement over the previous version.

7 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Found CD-R versions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5

    http://www.octave.com/551519/en/cdrmedia/businessc ard.html

    1. Re:Found CD-R versions by Jason+W · · Score: 5
      Here are some more vendors:

      http://www.cdr4less.com/cgi-bin/web_store.cgi
      http://cardiscs.com/citiscape-retail/buscarcdr.h tml
      http://www.topexpert.de/cd_info_e.htm
      http://www.i-mediacard.com/

  2. Re:Interesting... by dattaway · · Score: 4

    I'd rather have the linuxcare version with the debian, but had a good ride through there site trying to find one. Anyhow, google shows up some vendors of these business card cd's and cdr's:

    http://www.bizcard-cd.com/
    http://store.yahoo.com/c itiscape-retail/buscarcdr.html
    http://thiscardrocks.com/
    http://www.nimz.com/mbc.htm
    http://www.cds.com/shapes/default.htm
    http://www.mcmnewmedia.com/

    and many more places selling them. If linuxcare is selling their custom version, I'd sure like to know! And pass a few around! :)

  3. The only problem I see... by aressa · · Score: 4

    I think this is a really cool idea, don't get me wrong, but:

    These things don't work in mail-slot style ROM readers and they are precarious at best in caddy-readers... that is the only probelm I see.

    I have a couple of old Plextor and NEC ROM drives that use caddys that live in my Linux box, and a spankin new mail-slot DVD drive in my new computer, so I would not be able to use these. Maybe I should have thought of that! :)

    And of course the same goes for a a ton of Japanese market j-pop CD-singles that come on heart, star, and other shape (but balanced) CDs...

    A

  4. Re:Business card sized CD-recordables? (lQQk here) by victim · · Score: 4

    Ask and ye shall be linked. Look here for your very own business card CD-R blanks. Pricy compared to regular blanks ($2-$4 depending on quantity), but I never put a price on cool.

    No affiliation. I just know how to use Google.

  5. LinuxCare CDs: Not so lame after all... by rwg · · Score: 5
    At the most recent Atlanta Linux Showcase, the LinuxCare folks tossed one of their business-card sized recovery CDs in my bag. (Gotta love freebies.) After the initial guffawing over its size (the usable data area on the CD is only about 3/8" across), I popped it in one of my machines at home and rebooted. It turns out there's only around 32 megs of stuff on the CD, but it's enough to make a pretty usable recovery CD. (For comparison, tomsrtbt crams everything on a specially-formatted 3.5" high-density floppy.)

    One problem I had with the CD is that its size and shape makes it prone to "falling through the drive tray" when I use it in one of my SCSI CD-ROM drives. It's just small enough to slide through the slot in the back of the tray if the CD stops spinning at just the right position.

    I've been carrying the CD around in my bookbag and using it on campus lab machines. When I need to ssh somewhere, I reboot the machine with the LinuxCare CD in it, run dhcpcd, run the ssh installation script (which pulls a .deb of ssh from a foreign server and installs it on the ramdrive), and ssh as usual.

    As for availability, I doubt you'll find these things outside of computer shows. (Why not start a project to create a similar recovery CD?) As for its shape, look at www.shapecd.com for all the weird shapes you can have CDs cut. As for size, it's only slightly taller than a business card but not as wide.

  6. These things are fun! by toolj23 · · Score: 4

    I do tech support for a company who sent a large amount of these disks out as a promotion for a new product. Well, as you could guess we got plenty of calls where people had put them in the cdroms that don't have a tray that comes in and out. The ones that just suck the disc in. I even talked to one guy who put one in his regular cd-rom drive and when he opend the tray to take it out it had "eaten it" in his words. And now it was "lost somewhere in his cdrom drive."

    I don't know how many people they had to send reimbursement checks out for their cdrom drives to be fixed but we got quite a number of calls about it.

    Imagine if AOL sent out 20million disks like these. There goes 10million cdrom drives to the repair shop. Haha!