Cards, CDs & Software

A bootable business card (BBC) is a CD-ROM that has been cut, pressed, or molded to the size and shape of a business card (designed to fit in a wallet or pocket). Alternative names for this form factor include "credit card" and "wallet-size". The cards are designed to hold about 50 MB. more...

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The CD-ROM business cards are generally used for commercial product demos, are mailed to prospective customers and are given away at trade shows.

Although the term "bootable business card" could be applied to any bootable CD-ROM in the business card form factor, it almost always refers one which contains a compact Linux distribution generally containing a suite of system diagnostic and rescue tools and/or demos of specific packages.

History

In 1999 Linuxcare 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 in San Jose, California. The initial press run produced 10,000 copies. 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. 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.

At least one of the boxed Red Hat Linux packages included a system rescue CD in business card form factor.

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 Linux 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).

Read more at Wikipedia.org