Have you heard of the Mostly Harmless USB disk? What does it consist of? How does it work?
To learn more, meet Abhas Abhinav. He is a long-time community member of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) networks in India, particularly (but not restricted to) Bengaluru. He tells the story of this disk: “It started as an experiment to offer a convenient and always accessible tool to showcase and use a free OS anywhere. I have made multiple variants of it over the past two years. One was for the LibrePlanet conference in Boston, where we gave it out to some of the participants gratis — or at a price of their choosing.”
There are ten OSs in the Mostly Harmless USB disk — Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Alpine Linux are live and installable. Tails is a portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship. Tails bootable allows you to browse the internet over TOR. Short for The Onion Router, TOR is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. As Wikipedia explains, it directs internet traffic via a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network that consists of more than seven thousand relays. The price of the disk is ₹650.
As a part of the DebConf’23 conference (held in Kochi in 2023) swag, a unit of the MH-USB was given out to all the participants. This meant a total of around 300 units, in all, got distributed. This USB contained multiple images of various Debian GNU/Linux operating systems and derivatives.
This story is from the December 2023 edition of Open Source For You.
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This story is from the December 2023 edition of Open Source For You.
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