Bootable business card

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

[1] Although Damn Small Linux (2012-2014) did managed to fit an everyday desktop operating system on a bootable business card.

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.

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

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).

Because the business card form factor has such a small capacity the Linuxcare developers typically choose to use a compressed filesystem.

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.

A typical BBC contains a suite of networking, back-up and data recovery utilities, which is why they are valued by Linux system administrators as rescue tools.

At their core most BBCs are rescue and diagnostics tools for expert professionals, and normal user-operations are catered for better by Live CD distributions.