I am pleased to announce the release of Pocket ISR, a live Linux 
distribution with an ISR client and VirtualBox that can be used to boot 
any modern PC.  With Pocket ISR, any borrowed computer can be used as an 
ISR client with no prior planning and without installing software. 
Pocket ISR can easily be installed on a USB storage device or can be 
burned to a CD.

Pocket ISR includes the following major features:

- Pocket ISR can be installed on any USB flash drive with at least 300 
MB free, without disturbing existing data on the drive.  Installation is 
automated and can be performed from a Linux or Windows system.  The 
remaining space on the USB key is available for other uses.

- Pocket ISR performs well even with low-cost USB flash devices.  Parcel 
data is stored not on the flash drive, but in free space borrowed from 
the computer's internal hard disk.  Space can be borrowed from Linux 
swap partitions and NTFS, ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, including 
volumes stored in Linux RAID or LVM.  Existing data and metadata stored 
on these volumes is never altered.  All parcel data in transient storage 
is encrypted for security.

- If you have a high-performance USB device such as a hard disk or SSD, 
Pocket ISR can store parcel data directly on the device rather than in 
transient storage.

- Pocket ISR will notify you at startup if a newer version is available, 
and can automatically update itself to the latest version.


The first public release of Pocket ISR, version 0.9.7-3, comes with 
version 0.9.7 of the OpenISR client and version 3.0.14 of VirtualBox 
OSE.  KVM support is planned for a future release.

We intend to issue a new Pocket ISR release along with, or shortly 
after, each release of the OpenISR system.  Pocket ISR's auto-update 
facilities should make it easy for users to keep current with the latest 
and greatest OpenISR client.

Pocket ISR is available for download at:

	http://isr.cmu.edu/pocket-isr/

A more detailed technical report on Pocket ISR is available at:

	http://isr.cmu.edu/doc/CMU-CS-10-112.pdf

--Benjamin Gilbert