After reading about babeldisk the “safe” Linux distro, I thought I would have a play. Being a tightwad and happy with Ubuntu I decided not to sign up and buy a copy, but download the ISO image and have a look and see what it had on it.
I booted up the ISO using the magic that is qemu and kqemu (kernel accelerator).
$ qemu -cdrom Desktop/babeldisc_20070410.iso -m 512 -net nic -net user -boot d
The initial boot menu has an option for the “babel booster” which is a device you can buy from them which looks like it caches your data locally. I don’t have one so I booted using the second option – without the babel booster.
Note: I have made these comments links to images rather than images themselves to reduce the length of this post.
Press F1 for help and here are the boot options, so it’s built on Ubuntu Edgy by the look of it.
The logon screen, this is where it gets fun.
Now we have a browser we can go surfing
Navigate to file:///usr/bin/ and download the xterm binary
Right click the firefox download window and choose “Open containing folder”.
Then right click the xterm executable and tick ‘Allow this file to run as a program’.
Now we have an xterm without logging on. 
Interestingly, RealPlayer appears to be installed by default.
Their apt repository is http://apt.internetphoneco.com/apt/ and their value-add (besides the web based data storage) is the addition of the tools in http://apt.internetphoneco.com/apt/pool/main/b/, all starting with babeldisc-, amongst some other tools and utilities.
babeldisc-feedback seems to mainly consist of this script for sending useful diagnostic data info to babel support people. Interesting to see what they send and how they send it.
#!/bin/bash
. /tmp/tc-${USER}
DIR=/tmp/.feedback-${USER}
DATE=`date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S'`
TARBALL=debug_$DATE.tar.gz
DEBUGDIR=$SSHFS_MOUNT/.debug
/bin/mkdir $DIR
/bin/mount > $DIR/mtab
/bin/ps aux > $DIR/ps
/bin/ls -l $CACHEDIR > $DIR/cachedir
/bin/du -h $CACHEDIR >> $DIR/cachedir
/bin/cp $CACHEDIR/.debug* $DIR
/bin/cp /proc/cpuinfo $DIR
/bin/cp /proc/meminfo $DIR
/bin/cp /var/log/dmesg $DIR
/bin/cp /var/log/messages $DIR
/bin/tar cpvfz $DIR/$TARBALL $DIR
[ -d $DEBUGDIR ] || /bin/mkdir -v $DEBUGDIR
/bin/cp -v $DIR/$TARBALL $DEBUGDIR
/bin/rm -Rf $DIR
/usr/bin/firefox "http://www.babeldisc.com/tc-feedback.php?tcuser=${TC_USERNAME}&logball=${TARBALL}"
babeldisc-update has a set of scripts that live in /etc/rcS.d which forcefully update the machine as soon as it starts up. This is to obtain the latest versions of various packages from their repository. Worth noting the ubuntu repositories are commented out of the sources.list. I guess it could be annoying if you don’t have the babel-booster local cache as it would update every time you boot, being read-only media.
babeldisc-hdmount as you might expect loops through local disks and mounts them, making it easy to get to data on the local hard disk or USB devices (like memory sticks). I didn’t really have a look at the rest of the tools, so no idea what they do, but their names seem to give clues – babeldisc-login and babeldisc-logout for example
It is perhaps a little worrying that it ships with SSH enabled by default, and on the default port, 22. I don’t know the passwords for any of the users on this system (if indeed there are any) and if someone did know, I suspect it would not be difficult for them to discover ssh being open and attempt to connect. It is of course possible they configured their ssh daemon to only accept logins via keys, or disabled passwords on some accounts.
I find it interesting to see how companies can take a distro such as Ubuntu and tailor it for a specific need. This shows the power of open source software. Although of course babeldisc also ships with some non-free software such as realplayer.
I’m sure there are other interesting things to find in Babeldisc if you have a few minutes and qemu
3 Comments
Thanks for telling us about Babeldisc. It is a really unique idea. I wonder how responsive the system is considering that it is always running as a LiveCD. Extra memory is being wasted, and waiting for the CD drive which is MUCH (10x) slower than a hard drive. Also, how do I install new software? This is a neat idea and I wish them much success.
P.S. Why don’t they say “Powered by Ubuntu” or something similar? I think that would increase their credibility.
Tristan
It is a pretty neat idea. I can think of a few people who could benefit from a system like this. A friend at work told me the hard disk in his girlfriends laptop has gone phut, and this would be an ideal way to re-use that machine.
The babel guys actually emailed me today after posting that blog entry with some tips.
The babelstick – or hard disk device looks to be a copy of the CD image. So you get the benefit of improved performance by running apps off the cached copy on the USB stick over the CDROM. I suspect also get the option of installing extra software that way due to it being a read/write media.
Personally I don’t mind that they dont have a “Powered by Ubuntu” splash. It’s a branded product aimed at the low end of the technical market. I can see how too much of that might be confusing. There isn’t even much mention of Linux, Open Source or Free (speech) software on the website.
Mind you I haven’t even logged into it yet
It appears to have xfce4 as its window manager, so it has xfce4-terminal, which is nicer than xterm.
Also, I can’t seem to find the | character on the keyboard in terminal. Do you know what key combo would do that?
Nice hack, this will be fun to play with.