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What Would You Load onto a Business Card CD?
tkrabec asks: "I have a few of the Business card sized CD-roms, and I have been toying around about what to put on them. I want to make a utility disk that has stuff I commonly use or would find helpful. These CD's will hold about 50 meg I primarily do work with Win32 but I would also like some helpful linux things. I will probably make 2 disks wo get all data/programs I want.
I want to put: dos boot.img 1.4Meg for older machines, rawrite 14K to write .img's to floppy's, putty 695K for secure communications, memtest.img 75K for testing for bad memory, fdisk 65K for HD problems, Winzip 1.2Meg for unzipping things. These are just some idea's and I would like some more with some approximate sizes. Also are there any good references that I could put on there as well?"
Well, considering they're business card CDs, I'd put on them some useful, business related information:
1. My resume
2. A link to my personal web site
3. Some pictures of me, so maybe whoever I gave the card to will associate my face with my name
4. Maybe some of the music I've written as mp3 (or, if catering to a Slashdot crowd, ogg)
5. Anything interesting I've written that business associates might be interested in
6. Other nifty personal stuff
7. A cool screensaver, maybe? I dunno... I'm stretching now.
Make it professional, make it interesting, put some good, personally important stuff on there.
And, uh, be creative!
-NeoTomba
The trinux iso is about 40MB, and I was going to stick it onto a business card cd when I can find some. Some many things I can think of to do with them.
It confused the guy I gave it to - he thought it was just a bit of paper attached to a pile of CD's with a rubber band, and he looked at the CD's a few times before he worked it out.
They're normally more expensive, but that one was a giveaway. Also I wanted to see if it worked and only had to shift 7MB of data.
If I had something that I needed to take to work daily and couldn't have two copies of it I'd probably use them for that.
A sign of true geekness would be a linux distro on a credit card sized CD permanently stored in the wallet. Perhaps Slackzip would fit? You could whip it out at LAN parties to get a game of Freeciv going (be sure to wear sandals with socks for extra effect). Another alternative is XFree86 for win* on a credit card sized CD.
Well, I'd take WinRAR instead of WinZIP (its better, imho; its smaller; and it handles more file types). I'd probably also put TweakUI on there, as well as VNC (both the client and the server). A bunch of generic nic drivers. Some sort of ftp client (whatever is your favorite). There are tons of more stuff that you could argue to take, and you could probably take alot of it. And it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to make the whole damn thing bootable, and don't forget to load that generic oak cd driver. 50 mb is alot for a rescue disk....
On the linux side... First off, don't make a jack of all trades windows and linux disc. Make two seperate disks for two seperate OS's. And, before you go making a list of all the linux programs, check out tomsrbt. Although it was made with the 1.44mb limitation of regular floppys in mind, its a great starting point. And with the addition space you can add all the other goodies that he had to leave out due to the room.
I would rather use those small 8cm cd's. You can burn 200 mb on it and they're very cute. Moreover, they're not square so there's no risk of damaging your drive. And cheap too (1$ or so).
As a rescue disk, I like those 1 disk linux distributions. Especially fdisk is a great utility (in contrast with the Dos equivalent). Combine this with a windows bootdisk (to reinstall the bloody thing) and Ghost, and you're pretty safe..
Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox
LNX-BBC - Linux Bootable Business Card
The features of the first link is that it uses a 2.4 kernel and Xfree 4.1 (and more).
The selling feature of the second is that you can rsync/cvs its development tree, and thus insert your own tweaks into the card.
I'm not screamingly familiar with these versions, but the older BBC they gave away at LinuxWorld really rocks. Not just you're booting the Linux OS from CDROM, but it will handle networking, windowing, and webbrowsing. (And it has repair tools that I thankfully haven't had the need to demonstrate.)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Put on an audio track that says: "Put this in your computer! Dummy."
links to your own personal web site for starters, then links to YFWS (your favourite web sites, eg, Slashdot, OSDN, etc), a bit of personal info, a heap of loadable modules so you don't come across as the klutz-maestro when your victim inserts it only to find that he can't do anything because of driver problems, etc (and so they can use it as a rescue disk), plus intrusion detection tools ... apart from that - well, at 50 megs you're hardly likely to get much on it.
"I his bow, and spun and wove, likes you." Vere de Vere out of my mould's mouth dragged me of the voluntary apes.
- Hex editor, if you're that way inclined
- *Powerful* editor of choice (e.g. emacs, vi, PFE, etc.). Using notepad gets old REAL fast...
- Recent service pack, assuming it'll fit. I find myself searching for this more than anything else at sys repair time. Alternately, any recent IE update includes a lot of files that tend to get overwritten
- Small footprint, time wasting game of choice for those hours spent in computer rooms waiting for systems to rebuild. Think Tetris or nethack
- Resume. Never know when you'll want it...
- Download of www.darwinawards.com, text and hyperlinks only
Hmm, I'm sure there should be more
MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator)
(To the culturally deprived, its an emulator for arcade machine ROMS. You can play thousands of games from Donkey Kong to Bubble Bobble to Mortal Kombat. And you're not even limited to x86 platforms.)
Can't install games onto your work PC? Just run/boot off of your portable game cdrom.
Try these links:
MAME Homepage
MAME32 Homepage (MAME with a GUI menu)
An Arcade ROM Repository
Use Google to get you more ROM websites.
I really need to cook up one for myself. I like the idea of booting Linux and going straight to MAME, but it would eat CD-R space that could be used for more ROMs. Then again, booting Linux would let me setup a RAMdisk, which may help MAME deal with disk write issues. (There may be a M$ Windows utility that will create a RAMdisk without rebooting the OS.)
Last of all, a tip. Do your configuring on a CD-RW disk, get the written size under 50MB, and then burn the final ISO onto the business card CD-R.
Have fun.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Porn. That's what's on all my CD-Rs.
Just be aware that if this happens to one of your clients, it won't reflect well on your business, no matter who is at fault.
Now the linuxcare bootable recovery CDs. Now they are cool, and anyone who can install Linux I would hope would understand where they can stick it.
It all depends on your audience. In my opinion, don't be handing them out to the general public.
(Wishing I could cancel slashdot posts... )
Just got a few of these cdr's myself, and my favourite burn is all the useful bits of dos.
I've got my old dos floppy boot disk in the el dorado boot section, it also needs some cdrom drivers. On the cd proper, I've got the rest of dos, the dos version of partition magic, a ram disk driver (PQM needs to write some stuff while running), and then a few dos games that I found lying around.
I've used msdos 6.22, as I happened to find it on a technet cd, but freedos should work equally well.
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
I'd make the disk bootable to a DOS prompt. DOS is still very useful for recovering Windows systems (at least 3.11 to Millenium, it doesn't work with NT, or 2000). I'd try and track down DOS drivers for the network cards you use and have those load with the TCP/IP stack at boot-time as well.
TinyApps.org has some great stuff there, and it's all very small but very useful. For example, I'd dump WinZip and go with FreeZip. 1.5MB vs. 250KB
Here's my list:
* xcopy
* del
* deltree
* rename
* mkdir
* rmdir
* format
* fdisk
* Something like Norton Disk Edit where you can see and edit the whole disk.
* a DOS-based text editor.
* a file-splitter
* a file decompressor (pkzip?)
* a web browser (if you loaded the drivers at boot).
* maybe a partition resizer
* the cygwin-lite unix tools for 9x/ME/NT4/2000
Hope that gives you some help, and some room for improvement.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
If they wanted more then I'd supply a exe's that would be launchable and runnable from the cdrom. Basiclly nothing that they have to install. If your install fails they will likely not hire you. If you are a Java programmer include the jre and some java apps. If you do perl, include perl, and your app. If they are standard windows exe, make sure they can run from the cdrom and no registry editing. Think KISS = "keep it simple stupid". You may end up getting the cdrom to someone who is not computer savy and if you screw up their machine they will likely trash it.
Only 'flamers' flame!
But.
My first reaction on seeing it was, "Hey, that's great! A bootable disk I can keep in my wallet!" Wrong. Apparently the survival rate for that kind of storage is pretty low. What use is a "business card" you can't put in your wallet?
never underestimate an angry customer, some things may seem obvious to us, but not to everyone
differenct technical levels will affect what you need on there. if it's for dummies, some nice clear instruction with annotated screenshots are very helpful.
Check out the disk image Richard Berg over at Arstechnica setup. I don't remember the size it ended up at, though.
I used to carry a BBC (bootable business card) in my wallet, made from an image I got off linuxcare. It saved me several times, however, being in a wallet is pretty rough treatment for a CD, the disc developed small holes in the reflective surface and stopped working. So keep this in mind. I now have a more standard 3.5 inch disc, in its jewelbox, and carry that on my laptop's briefcase.
Hey! That's not nice...
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
I used to do support for a large number of Win95 PC's a few years back. I had a similar CD (full sized-though). The person who recommended VNC client and server was very insightful, I used these a lot, and they would be a must have. I had a few of the CAB files, that contained DLL's that were commonly corrupted on our machines, and up-to-date drivers for all the components. I was intimitely familiar with all those problem DLL's, but I don't know what they are anymore.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/lnx-bbc/
http://www.lnx.bbc.org/
Welcome to the LNX-BBC project. The LNX-BBC is a mini Linux-distribution, small enough to fit on a CD-ROM that has been cut, pressed, or molded to the size and shape of a business card.
#include "coucou.h"
I remember Dell giving out those CDs at a job fair last year. They also had a warning against putting them in the tray-type drives that were sold on their own systems at the time.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Although almost no slot fed CD drives accept miniformat discs, the drive on the iMac (and presumably, other Mac slot fed drives) are exceptions - they work fine. I'm not a big fan of Apple in general, but their hardware is often startlingly good.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I would install a utility that executes upon "autorun" and kills the screensaver (screen lock) application.
This would be very handy when you need to get into someone else's PC and the screen is locked.(When they are running the M$ OS.) You simply stick it in the CDROM and a few seconds later have access.
The smaller CD format would be handy to stick in your wallet or shirt pocket for just such occaisions.
O=='=++
I also through on there a look-alike font, and some other cool stuff about the car, like original sales information comparing it to corvettes and porshes in its day. Fun stuff.
I have thought about recording birthday greetings and making a mini videoCD... you know, the kids singing Happy Birthday to Nanna or whatever.
just don't have the time and energy to pursue my digital video interests yet. I've got the ATI AIWP128 that does some pretty decent capturing though!
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
There are a number of rescue CDs out there, but all of them require you to keep the CD in the drive to keep the rescue filesystem mounted. That ties up the drive, which is a bad thing if you want to load backups or other stuff from CDs. It would be nice to have a rescue image that is small enough to load entirely into a ramdisk or something, but not so small as to be limited like a rescue floppy. A 128MB system can easily afford, say, a 20MB rescue image. You could then take the CD out and use other CDs. It would be cool too if such a CD can adaptively load its goodies into a ramdisk depending on available RAM.
It consists of a smattering of DOS, Windows and OS/2 stuff, along with some of my favourite bitmaps.
The DOS stuff is either third-party, or from PCDOS 7.0 (these run under most versions of DOS). Some MSDOS stuff is there: qbasic.exe, edit.com and scandisk from Win95.
I have a little 10K utility for making boot disks for most versions of DOS and Win9X. In the redraft, I plan to make bootable diskettes in ram, and copy these to blank disks.
OS/2 stuff is selected so that it can run under NT as well: tinyedit, QH.
Windows stuff is mainly file management utilies like 4NT, FCW and Windows Commander. I have also the program Infraview32, and a smattering of useful WinNT reskit stuff.
It's not only useful for fixing up machines, but making machines that you live on more usable.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.