Here is the text from my home page being served by a Palm Pilot ↗.

This was a new concept for immersing conference attendees in the subject matter of the talks. We gave all attendees at the 2004 linux.conf.au in Adelaide a bootable CD containing a heterogeneous network of virtual computers running different operating systems, pre-configured with the speakers’ software I built the Inetd linux.conf.au LiveCD ↗ by modifying Knoppix ↗. Screenshots were in my own paper Tunnelling Hardware over SMTP ↗, selected for a re-run as one of the “Best Of” papers.

That was many years ago, but something similar could be useful and novel in 2026. jslinux by Fabrice Ballard ↗ is fast and has many years of optimisation, and this is the way to do it. I also tried container2wasm ↗ by Kohei Tokunaga ↗ but even with WASM snapshotting ↗ it’s too slow.

The linux.conf.au 2004 LiveCD desktop, showing its welcome page served by a virtual Palm Pilot running uClinux
The LiveCD after booting. The welcome page in KDE Konqueror is being served from uClinux running on the Palm Pilot emulator on the left.

Boot the talks

The LiveCD project page described the problem as:

Wow that was a nifty talk, I’ll try out that kernel patch/beta version/new thing just as soon as I get two days to learn how to install and drive it.

and of course, that never happens.

My answer was to distribute fully working environments with the talks, bootable on most laptops.

The conference hackers invitation ↗ asked for help build it, teasing the wonderful and sometimes weird conference talks with the LiveCD let us run a collection of unlikely systems for conference delegates to investigate the consequences.

Parallel and nested virtualisation in 2004

The welcome page looked like an ordinary web page, but its web server ran inside uClinux on an emulated Palm Pilot device. These had a Motorola 68000-family processor lacking a memory-management unit, requiring a tiny embedded version of Linux. A virtual serial port and PPP connected the Palm Pilot to the rest of the virtual network.

The disc also included:

  • several User-Mode Linux computers running Debian on a virtual network;
  • Bochs emulating a PC and booting NetBSD;
  • Hercules emulating a dual-processor IBM S/390 mainframe and running Linux/390;
  • multiple graphical desktops and virtual consoles;
  • the DaemonLinux virtual data-centre demonstration from Inetd.

Inetd was the company and conference sponsor, promoting their DaemonLinux services.

Canberra Linux User Group member Steven Hanley kindly said:

That would be the inetd/shearer.org livecd, Sun sponsored other things at LCA 04 but not the livecd. However yeah sure when we get back to Canberra I am sure there will be many people willing to burn copies, Dan Shearer has done a great job getting this thing made.

A mainframe on the laptop

Hercules turned the ordinary 32-bit Intel computer running the LiveCD into an IBM S/390 mainframe. Its Hardware Management Console initially showed an idle processor, waiting for the Initial Program Load command that corresponds roughly to booting a computer.

Hercules Hardware Management Console showing an idle emulated S/390 processor before boot
Hercules waiting to boot the emulated S/390. The red status line shows the processor's Program Status Word and a zero instruction count.

After IPL 0800, Linux/390 booted and reported two S/390 processors. The host underneath was a single-processor 32-bit Intel machine.

Linux running under Hercules with cpuinfo reporting two IBM S/390 processors
Logged in to Linux/390 under Hercules. /proc/cpuinfo reports a dual-processor IBM S/390.