From 'Mostly Harmless' Distros on a Pen Drive, to Liberated Hardware and More

Abhas Abhinav’s FOSS journey began in the late nineties. His love for open source has only grown stronger with the years, though he is not too happy about the way free and proprietary software are being mixed at will in today’s world.

- Abhas Abhinav

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.

Abhas recalls: “If you remember, there was a time when [Indian computer magazines] PC Quest, Linux For You (now known as Open Source For You), DeveloperIQ, and