The source of this information came from the Ubuntu Chinese forums, and it was also published at cnBeta.
This is not the first time I heard about strange patents filed in China. This time, Nanjing University and a company in Nanjing filed a patent at SIPO for Method to boot Linux operating system from mobile harddisk. The application was made on March 16, 2006, and was announced on September 19, 2007. With the help of Caius and Yijun, we tried to translate this patent application to English but we are not responsible for any mistranslation. The abstract of the patent is as follows:
“This invention is about the method to boot Linux OS on removable storage which is attached to the USB port of PC. It is implemented in a way that firstly, setup Linux OS in the removable storage; then enter BIOS of the PC, to change the boot sequence to USB-HDD or USB-ZIP first; now boot the system, so user can choose the Linux version, and Linux kernel with initrd will be loaded by bootloader from the removable storage to PC memory; then boot the Linux kernel, initialize system and run tasks; mount filesystem of initrd, then switch to root filesystem on the removable storage; detect hardware devices, install drivers and configure them automatically; finally, start the desktop session, after user has input the username and password, detect hardware partitions automatically and mount them.”
Ridiculous isn’t it? I hope that with this translation, we can reach to a wider audience. Anyone in China who disagrees with this application should debunk the patent claims by submitting the View allegation form.
