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What Would You Load onto a Business Card CD?

Posted by Cliff on from the taking-your-critical-utils-with-you dept.

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?"

5 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what would I put on them? by Pogue+Mahone · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Don't forget to put your public key on there too.

    --
    Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
  2. Closest links to your ultimate Linux business CD by slashdot_commentator · · Score: 3, Informative
    Pick one:

    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
  3. Audio Dummy by Sir+Runcible+Spoon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Put on an audio track that says: "Put this in your computer! Dummy."

  4. THE Killer Business Card CD-R by slashdot_commentator · · Score: 3, Interesting



    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
  5. Never underestimate the person you give it to... by weave · · Score: 4, Funny
    We had a load of them. Someone inserted it into a CD drive that just had a slot on the front (A Mac I believe), it got stuck, and she destroyed the drive trying to remove it. Of course, we got blamed for handing out a "defective" product.

    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.