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Bootable Business Card Distro Needs Testing

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the so-if-you're-gonna-be-sober-tonight dept.

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? :)

9 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Not a bad gimmick. by notque · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  2. picoBSD by deep13 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Brain ticks away..... by oliverthered · · Score: 2, Interesting

    .....MP3 business cards for music distribution/promotion?

    --
    thank God the internet isn't a human right.
  4. These are a great idea by Col.+Panic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. Fits on a floppy... by gillbates · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  6. another bootable distro... by yukster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  7. These cards are great... by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."
    1. Re:These cards are great... by jhoffoss · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Those pocket refs are awesome...There's also a PC Pocket Ref, here, though I don't have one of these.

      --
      Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
  8. Re:NOOO... by MrIcee · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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."

    I solved the problem of my business card being thrown away by having high-quality full-color hologram business cards made. They wern't cheap ($1.16 a piece) but they are effective. I've had people years later (I've been doing this over 10 years) call me up and say they never got rid of my card and now they had some business for me.

    There is just something about baubles that make people hold on to them (just look at trade show premiums).