Linuxcare is an American

IT services Information technology service management (ITSM) is the activities that are performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers. Differing from more technology-or ...

company founded in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

in 1998 by

Dave Sifry Dave Sifry is an American software entrepreneur and blogosphere icon known for founding Technorati in 2004, formerly a leading blog search engine. He also lectures widely on wireless technology and policy, weblogs, and open source software. Ear ...

Arthur Tyde Arthur Tyde is an American software entrepreneur and private investigator based in San Francisco and SE Asia. He has been an advocate for Open Source software since founding the first Linux Users Group in the San Francisco / Silicon Valley Area.BA ...

and Dave LaDuke. The company's initial goal was to be "the

800 number A toll-free telephone number or freephone number is a telephone number that is billed for all arriving calls. For the calling party, a call to a toll-free number from a landline is free of charge. A toll-free number is identified by a dialing prefi ...

for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

" and operate 24 hours a day. Due to the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

of the early millennium years, this version of Linuxcare morphed into

Levanta Levanta (previously Linuxcare) was a company based in San Mateo, California, United States, that created products for Linux management and data virtualization. Company history Linuxcare was founded in San Francisco in 1998 by Dave Sifry, Arthur T ...

and eventually sold in 2008.

Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox

In 1999, Linuxcare developed the Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox, also known as the Linuxcare BBC, or Bootable Business Card. The BBC was a

Live CD A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading fro ...

, a bootable Linux distribution designed to be run entirely from the CD. In 1999, this was a very new concept, and was preceded by only one other Linux distribution designed exclusively to be run from CD,

DemoLinux DemoLinux was one of the first Live CD Linux distributions. It was created by Roberto Di Cosmo, Vincent Balat and Jean-Vincent Loddo, in 1998. The DemoLinux CD was created to make it possible to use Linux without having to install it on the har ...

. While DemoLinux was designed to show the whole desktop experience of a Linux distribution, the Linuxcare BBC was designed to be used mainly as a utility CD, and was the first Live CD with this focus. The BBC distribution was under 50MB, and designed to fit on a

mini CD Mini CDs, or pocket CDs, are CDs with a smaller diameter and one-third the storage capacity of a standard 120 mm disc. Formats Amongst the various formats are the *Mini CD single, a small disc. The format is mainly used for audio CD si ...

shaped like a standard business card. It included utilities designed to assist system administrators, and was primarily a text console operating system, but a minimal Blackbox X11 UI was included. Linuxcare produced an initial launch of an unversioned release, pressed as business card CDs, and distributed them at

LinuxWorld LinuxWorld has various meanings: * LinuxWorld Conference and Expo - a series of Linux conferences worldwide that became OpenSource World in 2009 * LinuxWorld Magazine - a print publication produced from 2003 to 2006 * LinuxWorld.com Internation ...

1999. Versions 1.2, 1.5 and 1.6 were later released online, and pressed and released at other conventions and Linux user groups from 1999 to 2001.

LNX-BBC

On May 8, 2001,

Seth Schoen Seth David Schoen (born September 27, 1979) is senior staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology civil rights organisation, and has been actively involved in discussing digital copyright law and encryption since the 1 ...

announced that the original three developers of the Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox had left Linuxcare to fork the project into a new community project, named LNX-BBC. Release 1.6, released in May 2001, served as a transition release between Linuxcare and LNX-BBC, with both projects offering the same release on their respective sites. LNX-BBC produced three more BBC releases: 1.618 in August 2001, 2.0 in January 2003, and 2.1 on May 1, 2003. Early versions were assembled by hand, while later versions utilized GAR, a software build system built around GNU

Automake In software development, GNU Automake is a programming tool to automate parts of the compilation process. It eases usual compilation problems. For example, it points to needed dependencies. It automatically generates one or more ''Makefile.in' ...

. LNX-BBC was discontinued after the 2.1 release.

2011 company relaunch

The Linuxcare brand was repurchased by

and incorporated as an LLC by Dr. Scott S. Elliott and his partners in the state of California. The new company provides IT services to businesses related to

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

. Linuxcare LLC has offices in San Francisco and Manila.

References

External links

Linuxcare homepage / Invalid domain

LNX-BBC homepage / This site is now advertising related

* {{linux-distro Linux companies