|
A bootable business card comes in the form of a CD-ROM. It is cut, pressed and molded in the shape of a business card that can be easily placed in a wallet or pocket. It can store 50 MB of data. Bootable business card provides a suit of system diagnostic facilities, rescue tools and demos of some specific packages. Bootable business cards are generally used for the product demos, and in the trade shows. It can be mailed to the customer for the speedy information. Initially, the concept was introduced and proposed by the Linuxcare employee, Duncan MacKinnon. The phrase bootable business card was first introduced by the Duncan MacKinnon and his fellow employees. In the Linux World Expo, its premiere version was used and 10,000 copies were produced and distributed in the trade shows.
Since the product was developed in Linux, so there were no problem of license and other aspects. It was easily adopted by many other organizations. Its first full-fledged derivatives was produced by the Irish Linux Users Group often named as ILUG.
Operation:
An important part of bootable business card is its accessibility. It runs from the CD and the system's memory (RAM). Once the CD is inserted it powers up the system. It may require some changes in the system's firmware and non-volatile RAM. The change is to be done in the booting process so that it can boot the system from CD over any other installation process. Once the system is booted it just require the CD to run the operating system. Because of its small capacity, compressed file system is used. It allows user to store more data in less storage that is 100 megabytes of software in 50 MB of disk space. It scans the system for recognized filesystems. Not only this it also maintains the networking, back-up and data recovery process.
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). It also supports 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.
|
|
