Linuxcare is an American IT services company founded in San Francisco in 1998 by Dave Sifry, Arthur Tyde and Dave LaDuke. The company's initial goal was to be "the 800 number for Linux" and operate 24 hours a day. Due to the dot-com bubble of the early millennium years, this version of Linuxcare morphed into Levanta 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 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. 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 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 1999. Versions 1.2, 1.5 and 1.6 were later released online, and pressed and released at other conventions and