Byzantium v0.5b

Project Byzantium, a working group of HacDC (http://hacdc.org/) is proud to announce the release of v0.5 beta of Byzantium Linux, a live distribution of Linux which makes it fast and easy to construct an ad-hoc wireless mesh network which can augment or replace the current telecommunications infrastructure in the event that it is knocked offline (for example, due to a natural disaster) or rendered untrustworthy (through widespread surveillance or disconnection by hostile entities). Byzantium Linux is designed to run on any x86 computer with at least one 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless interface. Byzantium can be burned to a CD- or DVD-ROM (the .iso image is around 335 megabytes in size), booted from an external hard drive, or can even be installed in parallel with an existing operating system without risk to the user's data and software. Byzantium Linux will act as a node of the mesh and will automatically connect to other mesh nodes and act as an access point for WiFi-enabled mobile devices.

This release of Byzantium Linux constitutes the third milestone of our ISC grant, and adds support for AX.25 packet radio using amateur radio equipment. This release also incorporates a fully distributed multi-user microblogging application called Groundstation, which aims to take the place of Twitter.

This is a normal ISO-9660 image that can be burned to optical disk, copied onto a flash drive, or installed with the built-in installation utility.

For more information, please visit our website (http://project-byzantium.org/).