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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? :)
You can find the full details of the testing announcement here and here
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)
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...
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
The above (in non-Google cache form -- I'm trying to be nice to the Debian servers!) contains a link to a script for those interested in rolling their own.
this doesn't seem to be a bootable working distro, just a bootable disk with source code to build and install your distro. it might let you repair your system a little if you can't boot your linux system, but it's not going to let you run kde and such without some serious efforts. this is more like the gentoo stage 1 install cd's. gentoo has a bootable cdrom (with some beta game on it too) which sounds more like what you're talking about.
Actually, yes. It could be compiled from an intermediate format. (eg. Java bytecode) Not that they'd do it that way, but yes, it is possible to compile from something other than source code. =)
I just want to take over the world...Why does that automatically make me EVIL?
It's been a real timesaver too. Anything it doesn't have that I needed, I just threw on to a 3 1/2" CDR.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
You are mistaken.
The LNX-BBC boots into a fully running system. GAR is the compile tree, and we use it to track the changes we make to the LNX-BBC.
Yes, it's true that you won't fit KDE onto th 50MB media, but we ultimately hope to use the same build tree to compile for targets like 8cm and full-sized CD-ROMs.
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
There's nothing wrong with it. I'm in the same boat with the author, in that I want the card, but not the membership. I don't especially disagree with them (well, actually I believe a creator has the right to decide what to do with their work, but if they GPL it that's great), but I don't feel passionately enough about it to feel right about calling myself a member.
give credit where credit is due. your sig is a mitch hedberg quote.