Slashdot Mirror
Bootable Business Card Distro Needs Testing
dbarry writes "Many here have read recently about the FSF membership program. The much-coveted membership card is to be a version of the Bootable Business Card distribution. We are curently looking for testing of our pre-2.0 releases and automated builds.
The 2.0 release of the LNX-BBC (and, thus, the FSF membership card) will use the powerful GAR build system to compile nearly all software on it from source code. As such it has changed greatly since the 1.618 release from 2001." Is it ok to covet the card but not the membership? :)
A couple years ago I was buying RAM at a store. The manager wanted $150 for 4mb. I told him that some day I would be able to buy 256mb of Kingston RAM for $40. He laughed and said, "LOL, Bootable Business Card".
Well, having a linux distrib in your wallet is much more attracting to the ladies than, say, a condom.
You can find the full details of the testing announcement here and here
But, I always carry around several cds anyway.
And with the rate I lose those, I don't want to have to carry anything smaller.
http://use.perl.org
It's also trivial to create a spare partition (or remount a RAM disk as root), install a Debian system exactly as you like it, mount etc and var on a RAM filesystem and copy contents in with the init, and then burn the entire filesystem as an ISO, putting the kernel in place with the installer build tools.
I have a similar setup which is capable of mounting ntfs and fat32 filesystems. This has saved me a number of times in repairing screwed up 2000 and XP machines. The NT/2K/XP console mode is a joke. Using this disc, I can get in to repair the install without having to physically yank the drive and install it in another box!
How many people will use this as a portable OS. When they need to use a computer and only Windows is around, they will slip in the card and boot for a useful OS.
You'r not comming in, where's you tux?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Just out of curiosity - why is the FSF card booting Linux instead of the Hurd?
Advice: on VPS providers
No matter what you think, having either in your wallet isn't necessarily going to get you laid. :-)
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
to compile nearly all software on it from source code. Is there really any other way to compile?
Oi, that could get messy. :)
Why not picoBSD? http://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/ We had tremendous success while setting up firewalls in india with this. It's much easier to get a floppy through customs than an actual Cisco box (and you don't have to bribe anyone ;-) )
We just mailed them the floppy: pre-configured with ipfw and squid and some instructions on how to boot from it, where to plug what net cable and how to create the squid cache on the HD.
.....MP3 business cards for music distribution/promotion?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
There was a story about the Bootable Business Card on Tech TV a few months ago. Some mom was shopping her kid around to the talent agencies. Nice gimmick and all, except this BBC fucked over one agents computer. Due to the unusual shape, it got stuck in the drive. They tried it on the show, and it got stuck in theirs too.
NOT exactly a good way to win friends, by giving them something that destroys their system...
Hey, is that 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 in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Best Windows Freeware
"Imagine a cluster of these?" you say?
That's what I'm doing here.
First off, I can almost see this being successful in the sense that an administrator could carry it in his wallet and therefore use the cd to repair machines.
However, cd's are thick and hard (get your mind out of the gutter) so I really wouldn't want to put one in my wallet; nor would I want to sit down if I had one in my wallet, for it would surely crack in half.
Lastly, remember picture-disc shaped LP's? They never caught on. It's seems that abnormally shaped media is viewed by the public as a novelty and soon rejected.
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
I have a client who is an artist and wanted to make a business card that automatically opens a picture of one of his paintings when inserted in the drive. I threw together a little .html file and an autorun.inf that uses a freeware util called shelexec to launch the .html file with the default browser.
Really neat idea, and he can include links to a website or mailto on the page with the picture.
if you're not familiar yet with the good gnus [gnu.org], you may want to first acquire a browser [mozilla.org] that doesn't: begin to eXPloit you, &/or, "redirect" you, to the FraUDuleNT pourtolls of the stock markup hostage ransom scam liesense peddlers.
no phony DOWts any more?
ucann go over to father william's "free" hostdead session, if you knead this FraUDuleNT /.charade to .continue. you KNOW what to do, robbIE? @40?
I've been looking for a truly "portable" OS for quite some time - one that I could fit on a single bootable floppy and have a GUI interface. Upon failing to find anything suitable, I have since started writing my own. As I have a penchant for assembly language programming, I'm about halfway done with it.
Hopefully, someday the OS will be completely irrelevant. It would be really nice if I could carry around all of my key data on a self booting floppy, rather than having to worry about synchronizing multiple data sets between different machines (work, home, laptop, etc...) That way, it wouldn't matter what OS was used on a particular machine.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I'm not terribly sure I'd trust an application given to me on a business card by someone I don't know, much less something that boots.
Please, I'm begging.
I recieve enough email at work that I don't bother to reply to, enough business cards, and idle conversation.
I do not need to load some electronic buisness card to contact someone.
I can just write it down!
"Whenever anyone hands me something, it's like they're saying, "Here... you throw this away."" - Mitch Hedberg
http://use.perl.org
That is as funny as hell, thanks for the chuckle. This damn 20 seconds required before submitting is kind of an annoyance.
The FSF signup info page says that with membership, you get all FSF products with a 20% discount.
Wowzers, now I can pay 20% less than free for gcc.
Sure it may not seem like much, but it adds up.
My Gentoo Install Disk and my Mandrake "network.img" boot floppy is all I need on the go!
so, you've seen the ADs too? just woreabull. i think they/we've been duped AGAIN.
mod us up robbIE, IT's not getting any better (even with the whoreabull ADs) DOWn here. run for your options, if you have any. don't try to FUDge the gnus here, or you may WINd dupe aloan.
Yes, it's true. I cary mine in my walet. Saved me a few times, and people always look at you funny when you pull out a cd from your wallet.
I use it mostly for testing hardware, I wish they could include FAT32 and NTFS support with samba, or atlease ftp so you can copy files of a dead windows box... Anyone know of anything like that? I'm not a programer myself.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
while many of you probably hate IE as well I thought some might find this humorous.. if you visit the BBC home with IE a JS error occurs pointing to a permission error on the file at: http://www.lnx-bbc.org/iesuckssohard.htc Im glad they dont mind annoying some of the people that come to their site to help or learn more about what they are doing. I know, the haters are probably saying, if you are using Linux you wouldn't be using IE anyway - well when Im using a non-linux machine I will keep using IE until I see a compelling reason to switch (and a tabbed interface isn't one) or when my customers all switch to something else...
Is it ok to covet the card but not the membership? :)
So what's wrong with the FSF? Did RMS say something that hurt your feelings? No need to put flamebait in the main post.
abnormally shaped media is a novelty, and is soon rejected.
KFG
While we're on the subject, these guys are putting together a decent bootable distro. I have their 0.5.2 and it boots and finds all devices on all four of my x86 boxes. No KDE or Gnome mind-you, though it uses blackbox with a choice of themes, so I'm happy (though I prefer enlightenment). It also has mozilla and found the NIC on all the boxes. And it has their MuSE software for streaming audio, which is what the whole thing is about, I think.
I heard that they're getting close on a vers. 1.0. I'll definitely be checking that out. It'd be cool if eventually you could put it on a CD-RW and be able to save your settings and work on the same disk. That and I'd like to figure out some way of cracking hard-drive permissions so it would actually be useful for maintenance on a errant machine.
I think Micro$oft would disagree here, if Windows comes on your computer for free, then you have a pirated copy, don't confuse bundled with free, it's then, and you are paying for it (and it usually has to set itself up/install anyway).
This is not the sig line you are looking for... -- Old Jedi Sig Line Trick
Is that a Linux distro in your pocket, or you're happy to see me?
Is it ok to covet the card but not the membership? :)
Who cares? It's the FSF, so just rip the card and burn your own. For added irony, you could make a point of not including "GNU/" in front of "Linux" and include free(beer)/nonfree(speech) software in your own distro.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Back when Linuxcare was still growing, they were producing these cards like mad. If you liked Linux, they would give you a dozen for free (To pass out at Lugs and geek-parties... "FOR THE REVOLUTION!" they said). I have given a bunch of them away to friends, and keep a copy at home and at work.
I really like small tools that have multiple uses, and this Linux CD fits well. I keep one in my mini-toolkit, right next to a Leatherman Multitool and Pocket Ref.
And yes, I have actually used it when I upgraded my RH6.2 to 7.2 (The GRUB install failed miserably), and to recover data from a friends partition.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
*The latest versions of the GPL allow them to switch the license on the software to future versions at their discretion. So.. since they write the license and have the power to do as they wish on the code nothing will stop them from "helping us for our own good".
It's got the geek factor, sure.
But...How useful is it?
Many PCs have the "slot" CD reader. This won't work there.
What happens with these mini-disks in a laptop, if it gets bumped, etc.
Then there's the whole "wallet" thing. I expect that a cd in my wallet would have a life expectancy measured in minutes.
bootable business cards laugh at you!
The TCO of the Linux Bootable Business Card distribution is much higher than standard business cards (1,000 for just $30!). Just look at the cost of business card CDRW disks!
Don't believe me? Just ask Microsoft.
So, do you distribute a less than friendly version with your competitors logo on it at trade shows? That'd be just plain evil.
Personally I don't think I'd stick any software in my machine that could boot the machine from an untrusted source. I mean, this guy you just met (otherwise you wouldn't need his business card) gives you a piece of software that basically has root privilidges on your machine or better. Atleast if someone gives you a business card with software on it that does not boot you can run the software in a sandbox.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
You don't hand them out like candy. YOU keep it in YOUR wallet for those emergencies when a boot disc comes in handy.
A /. Editor that doesn't toe the line regarding FSF and GNU being all powerful and all knowing, and the only orginization to even think about.
How could you slight them. The membership should be a forgone conclusion, you should be trying to pay twice the dues, and signing up your friends.
You should pass on the membership cards since they should be spending all that valuable time championing the GPL. We need the freedom to live under the rule of what RMS thinks is reasonable. Since he is the only reasonable person, it is pure unadulterated freedom to live like he wants me too.
Looks like this beast doesn't fit on all credit-card sized CDs. Now I'm just downloading Sysadm
hehe! i tried it and sure enough I got the JavaScript error. It came up saying "Problems on this web page may cause some items to not show up properly, yadda yadda yadda... " Click on the "Details.." button to read the compiler error message.
Thanks! i needed a laugh.
Let the FLAMING BEGIN!!!!
They are about impossible to find unless you want to buy them in bulk...
The small round ones you CAN get ( still in *way* overpriced packs of 50 ) dont fit in the wallet very well.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I once shot a man in my humble opinion. How he got in my humble opinion, I'll never know.
Okey, off topic now. But that drives me crazy. I hate distro's that require a CDdrive to boot/install. My CD drive is SCSI and cannot boot, so when I want to install a new distro or what not, I need to steal an IDE CD drive from my wifes machine. I keep a copy of slack 8.0 boot disks around for being able to boot for a recovery disk. I wish that 8.1 could still use the disks. :-( No dice though.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
...Philips' preferred name for the files are CD-DA (Compact Disk - Digital Audio) files. Since 8.3 format (DOS, Windows 3.x) did not allow more than a three character extension, .CDDA was out of the question.
I don't even think that files on a Red Book CD are "files" the way we think of them. They are chunks of raw digital audio at 44.1KHz. "Ripper" programs take that raw digital audio and reformats it into actual files a computer can understand.
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
I've got some 35M business cards and what I'm planning on doing is putting several bootable floppy images on it and having a choice of which floppy to boot from, particularly if I incorperate some bootable floppys that normally take a few disks to boot, say for instance the winxp setup disks. The plan for that is exact all the files to the same folder and grab the initial boot sector to make it bootable.
I'm hoping that creating a boot loader with lilo and choosing which floppy to boot off.
Anyone got an experience of this and care to share thier thougts?
That shooting someone in your humble opinion is justifiable homicide in 49 states? The exception is of course Utah with their strange Mormon/alien laws.
Ching!
http://use.perl.org
We've had a few problems at work where users would use these cds they got from other clients and they would get stuck in the CDROM. Not fun at all to fix...
No, it's dumb. It's data on a CD. Surely we know how to put data on a CD ourselves by now. No coveting necessary.
Just buy some business-card CD blanks at Best Buy, download the image from the website linked in the story, and burn it to the CD. Or burn it to a normal CD if you don't need/want the business-card size.
The lead-in on the article makes it look like it's an FSF-only thing, but it isn't. The Bootable Business Card isn't an FSF project; the FSF is just using it to make its membership cards niftier.
The whole point of them asking you to test it is that they want you to burn your own. If you wait until you get one with your FSF membership, you're not "testing", you're "using".
What blowhard decided dark blue links on a black background was a good idea? I'm not design guru, but I at least have a little common sense...
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Is it ok to covet the card but not the membership? :)
If you don't want one with the FSF logo, then make your own.
Please tell me: Why should I covet a membership card for an organization which was founded -- as stated by its founder, Richard Stallman, -- to ensure that good jobs for programmers such as myself are "banned?" (Yes, he said this; read The GNU Manifesto.)
My computer came with Emacs and GNU/Linux.
;)
ObOnTopic: Get your FSF membership number before we run out of 3-digit numbers -- your low number will be worth serious geek cred in the future. But not as much as mine, which is #3
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
You can burn the root.bin off of the CD onto a floppy, and boot off of that. The BBC uses the El-Torito boot standard, which basically defines a header for the location of a 1.44MB FAT volume. It's loopy, but it works on the widest set of machines.
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
Ive not seen a 'slot drive' in many years on a pc.. Even then they had those damned 'carriers' so they wouldnt be an issue anyway....
Seen plenty on mac's but this doent apply to mac hardware anyway..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Remember the 1 disk GUI QNX Demos?
I must admit to using a full-sized CD for most of my rescue work. I'm very fond of Knoppix, and boot it in "blind" mode (text-only) with no swap. It has a lot more on it than the LNX-BBC, auto-detects everything and will mount all sorts of local and remote filesystems. Plus it has VNC, SSH, parted and so forth.
:v)
I did put a LNX-BBC in my wallet and it snapped in half. Given that business card CDs seem to be an expensive novelty in NZ and generally only hold 35MB I have yet to repeat the exercise.
Vik
...where, in the Metaverse, passing around globs of information was done by "visually" passing around things like business cards. The act of accepting one transferred the data, so you didn't just blindly accept one from someone you didn't know.
Plus the scene where the hero, uh, I mean, the protagonist, uh, I mean, the main character takes a card that represents a lot of data, and as the card passes from another person's hand to his, the world becomes slightly blocky and pixelated. His computer is so busy chunking down that much info that the refresh rate of his virtual eyes gets lagged. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
And I do not mean the T.V. channel. I have a BBC, and yes on a 52 meg business card. And I keep it with me where ever I go. Sure it's too geeky to admit to some one but it has helped me out numerous times, when some one fudges up their system at work, or even a laptop that craps out. Not many people have a restore disk or a Live CD available then. Plus with it you can get a basic Xserver with xterm, and Black Box as the WM. Can mount many file-systems, setup networking....This could also be a great hacking distro-but I'm sure some else already has done it.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
There are at least 3 other "forks" of the original Linuxcare version, and LNX-BBC is only one of them. Two others carry more features, and are being used in commercial capacities.
All in all, it's nice to see LNX-BBC modeling what the Linuxcare versions offered, including the source-build process. Great work guys.
This thread almost makes me want to go out and get a Yamaha T@2 drive, and make some non-bootable CD business cards...
I bought 7.3 redhat box for installations i did while back and the box included a rescue cd that was the size of "business card". Well, allmost. The cd was actually few millimeters too wide to fit into wallet's "card compartment" and nice idea was totally useless.
Hopefully FSF gets their business card to the right size..
yush
It should CLEARLY be the GNU/LNX-BBC!
This is a test release. Do you think you could have filed this in our bug system like we asked? Whingeing on slashdot isn't going to fix anything.
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
If it's an FSF membership card, don't they want it called GNU-LNX-BBC?
a bootable business card.. that sounds like a highly unpractical invention, if it would be an invention at all. talk about over kill just to give someone a way to contact you. ever thought about using magnetic strips on cards? or old fashioned ink? im sure the busy CEO you want to ink a deal with wouldn't even bother figuring out how to "boot" a business card. Oh well, I can't get this guys number and I'm too busy, toss it in the garbage.
u r a lmaer
It seems that this could be modified to contain your resume, and a selection of your work. For example, you hand out some CDs they boot them, your resume comes up, and they can browse around, and play with and browse your code. I don't know if it would give you an advantage, but it seems that they would remember your resume.
move along, nothing to
Comment removed based on user account deletion
(did a google search on qnx demodisk)
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
To the person that modded this off-topic:
I have meta-modded you unfair. This means you have less of a chance of moderating in the future. Next time, please learn what "off-topic" means by reading the moderator guidelines.
Anonymous Meta-Mod
The last time somebody said, "I find I can write much better with a word
processor.", I replied, "They used to say the same thing about drugs."
-- Roy Blount, Jr.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...