Bootable business card
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A bootable business card is a CD-ROM that has been cut, pressed, or molded to the size and shape of a business card (designed to fit in your wallet or pocket). They are designed to hold about 50 MB.
Although the term could be applied to any "bootable" CD-ROM in the "business card" form factor it almost always refers to a compact distribution (distro) of Linux generally containing a suite of system diagnostic and rescue tools and/or demos of specific packages.
(Note: The "business card" form factor is also sometimes referred to as "credit card" or "wallet sized.")
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History
The CD-ROM business cards are generally used for commercial product demos, mailed to prospective customers and/or given away at trade shows. In 1999 Linuxcare (http://www.linuxcare.com/) employee Duncan MacKinnon proposed the idea of producing and distributing such a card for an upcoming tradeshow. He and his team of volunteers (fellow employees) coined the phrase "bootable business card."
The premiere version was available at the first LinuxWorld Expo (http://www.linuxworld.com) in San Jose, California. The initial press run produced 10,000 (ten thousand) copies and most of those were given away at the show and shipped to Linux users groups in the ensuing months.
Since the project consisted of open source and free software and the idea was compelling and simple a number of other Linux BBCs rapidly became available.
The first derivative was produced by the Irish Linux Users Group (http://www.linux.ie) (ILUG). Over the years most of the creators of the original Linuxcare BBC left the company but have continued to work on the project which is now called the LNX-BBC (http://www.lnx-bbc.org/).
At least one of the boxed Red Hat Linux packages included a system rescue CD in business card form factor (which appears to have been a completely independent project inspired by the Linuxcare BBC).
Many derivatives and clones of the BBC have proliferated. Almost all of these run on PCs. Limited success has been achieved on BBCs and LiveCDs on other computing platforms.
The early versions of the Linuxcare BBC were collections of packages that had been precompiled for other distributions (such as Debian and Red Hat from which subsets of files were copied into the directory from which the BBC was "mastered" (the ISO 9660 CD disc images were built).
Building the entire mini-distribution from source code was the major undertaking of the LNX-BBC project (which formed of the original Linuxcare members with other contributors and volunteers). The first version of the LNX-BBC that was independent from Linuxcare was 1.618 (a number suggested by team member Seth Schoen, an approximation of the golden mean or phi and a tribute to Don Knuth who used successively more precise approximations of π for versioning his TeX typesetting system).
Beginning with version 2.0, all LNX-BBC discs are built entirely from source code using the GAR system. This version was used by the Free Software Foundation as their membership card (given sponsoring members for their donations).
There have also been "BBC" releases of other free operating systems such as FreeBSD.
Operation
The key of the "bootable business card" is that it runs completely from the CD and the system's memory (RAM). One simply puts the CD disc into the drive and powers up (boots) the computer. (The settings in the CMOS Setup menus of the system's firmware and non-volatile RAM might need to be adjusted to change the system's "boot order" so that it boots from CD in priority over any installed hard disks).
Once booted up the operating system runs from the CD and out of the system's RAM. Because the business card form factor has such a small capacity the Linuxcare developers chose to use a compressed filesystem. This allows the typical BBC to contain about 100 megabytes of software in only about 50MB of disc space.
The original BBC and most of its clones and derivatives will scan the system for recognized filesystems, automatically "mounting" these up in read-only mode. This makes filesystems on any local hard disks accessible while minimizing the risk of inadvertent corruption, deletion or other damage to the computer's own files.
A typical BBC contains a remarkably comprehensive suite of networking, back-up and data recovery utilities which is why they are valued by Linux system administrators as rescue tools. (The "business card" form factor fits conveniently in a typical shirt pocket).
Many BBCs use the cloop (compressed loopback) driver which provided a compressed read-only filesystem for Linux. Of course they typically have some of the system's memory (RAM) configured as a ramdisk (or perhaps several RAM disks). This typically leaves the CD-ROM drive dedicated for the duration of the system usage. However, some BBCs create a larger ramdisk and copy the entire system off the CD, thus making the drive available for other CDs or DVDs. This is useful because most PCs have only a single CD or DVD drive.
Once booted these systems provide a UNIX/Linux command line prompt (generally as the root user). Some also provide some very compact graphical user interface (GUI) tools. The LNX-BBC includes a small X (X Windows System) server and a web browser called BrowseX (among many other tools).
However, at their core most BBCs are rescue and diagnostics tools for expert professionals. A normal user would be far happier with a full-sized LiveCD.
Alternatives
Quite apart from the "business card form factor", there are a number of LiveCD Linux distributions which operate in a manner that's similar to the BBCs. The premier among these is Klaus Knopper's KNOPPIX (http://www.knoppix.net).
Although there had been other "live" CDs of Linux software, Klaus Knopper took the compressed filesystem drivers from the Linuxcare BBC, updated and adapted them and used them on full-sized (5.25") media to stuff about 2 gigabytes of free Linux software onto 700MB CD discs.
Many BBCs can also be configured to run from USB thumb drives or other media.
Some variations of Linux, including KNOPPIX can be booted over a network and run with no local media at all. The "knoppix-terminal-server" program allows any KNOPPIX booted system to serve as a server for any number of diskless workstations while the LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org) and PXES Universal Linux Thin Client (http://pxes.sourceforge.net) projects offer other alternatives. PXES also provides a "live" CD which starts at a size of only 7MB.
It's even still possible to boot a relatively functional Linux system off of a single floppy and there are many such distributions available. The most well known of these is Tom Oehser's Tomsrtbt (Toms Root/Boot disk).
See also: LiveCD
External links
- Damn Small Linux (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/) (DSL): based on Knoppix, good hardware support
- INSERT (http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html) (Inside Security Rescue Toolkit): based on DSL, includes Captive for relatively safe NTFS read/write.
- FeatherLinux (http://featherlinux.berlios.de/): based on DSL, larger than 50MB, actually designed for USB keys or fullsize CDs, not BBCs.
- Flonix i-USB (http://www.flonix.com/): based on Knoppix, designed for USB keys.
- Linuxcare (http://www.linuxcare.com) LBT (http://lbt.linuxcare.com/index.epl)(Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox): an old project no longer maintained.
- Puppy Linux (http://www.goosee.com/puppy/): handmade from scratch.
- Austrum Latvijas Linukss (http://cyti.latgola.lv/ruuni/index_en.html) (Austrumi)
- PLD Rescue CD (http://rescuecd.pld-linux.org/)
- PXES Universal Linux Thin Client (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pxes/pxes-0.9-1PB.iso?download) (PREBUILT ISO image ~17 Mb)