Bootable business card

Did You Know?

• The LNX-BBC includes a small X Window System server and a web browser called BrowseX.
• Damn Small Linux (2012-2014) managed to fit an everyday desktop operating system on a bootable business card.

History

The concept was proposed in 1999 by Linuxcare employee Duncan MacKinnon for an upcoming tradeshow. He and a team of fellow volunteers coined the phrase "bootable business card". The premiere version debuted at the first LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose, California, with an initial press run of 10,000 copies; most were given away at the show and shipped to Linux users groups. Because the project used open source and free software, other Linux BBCs rapidly appeared.

The first derivative came from the Irish Linux Users Group. Over time, most original Linuxcare BBC creators left the company but continued the project, now called the LNX-BBC. At least one boxed Red Hat Linux package included a system rescue CD in business card form. Many derivatives and clones have proliferated, almost all running on PCs.

Building entirely from source was the major undertaking of the LNX-BBC project, whose first independent version was 1.618, a number approximating the golden ratio and a tribute to Donald Knuth's versioning of TeX. Beginning with version 2.0, all LNX-BBC discs are built from source using the GAR system. This version was used by the Free Software Foundation as their membership card. More recently, Damn Small Linux and FreeBSD have had BBC releases.

Operation

The key feature is that the system runs completely from the CD and the computer's RAM, as several Live CD versions of Linux have done. The user puts the CD in the drive, powers up, and ensures the CD drive is selected for boot before the hard drive. Once booted, the operating system runs from the CD and out of RAM. Because the business card form factor has small capacity, developers typically use a compressed filesystem, allowing about 100 MB of software in about 50 MB of disc space.

The original BBC and most clones scan for recognized filesystems and mount them in read-only mode, making local hard disks accessible while minimizing risk of corruption. A typical BBC contains networking, backup, and data recovery utilities, valued by system administrators as rescue tools. Many BBCs use the cloop driver for a compressed read-only filesystem, and configure some RAM as a ramdisk. This usually dedicates the CD-ROM drive, though some BBCs copy the entire system off the CD to free the drive.

Once booted, these systems provide a UNIX/Linux command line prompt as root; some also include compact GUI tools. The LNX-BBC includes a small X server and the BrowseX web browser. At their core, most BBCs are rescue and diagnostics tools for professionals.