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GlobeTrotter: Mandrake-based 40GB Linux Mobile Desktop
joestar writes "Mandrakesoft & LaCie have just launched "GlobeTrotter", a ultra-compact 40 GB bootable USB hard-drive pre-loaded with Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official. It may be plugged to any available PC with a USB 1 or USB 2 port, automatically recognizes the host-PC's hardware, and then is ready to use. Multiple uses can be imagined, from the office/internet workstation to the multimedia jukebox! The concept is quite similar to Mandrakemove, excepted that it's way more powerful than a USB-key based system! And for $219 it's a credible alternative to a laptop."
It's not really an alternative to a laptop imho - check its weight. Always recall that transportable doesn't make it portable. ;)
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
to hijack data off a system that you dont have the password to log into yourself..
?SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 42
I think this is great. Not only can you take along your preferred operating system, but your files, too.
Maybe my hardware is old, but can most boxes boot off USB these days?
How is this different from just using a regular external hard drive? My roomate has installed Mac OS X on his iPod and exclusively uses that as his mobile platform. Just find a Mac and plug it in.
After reading the article, I wonder what exactly makes it so special? Perhaps the convenience of the entire setup, but for 40 gig, you would expect a lower price. I can get a USB enclosure for a hard drive for $30.00 here or perhaps elsewhere for even less. A 200 gig HD from tigerdirect.com is $89.99. Don't get me wrong, I am really excited to see Linux systems set up like this, but the price kind of threw me off.
With USB2, its feasible, but I surely wouldn't boot off a USB1 device unless realy no other options are available. Or the machine has so much ram, I barely acces my swap.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Dude - that's a mirror, not a computer screen
I've never seen "USB" as an option in the "A, C, CDROM" selections in any BIOS setup program I've ever touched. Is it handled somewhere else, or is it just very rare among ~1-year-old hardware?
Carrying along a bootable CD and a USB storage device sort of defeats the purpose.
Loadlin would be a natural for this thing...
Perhaps it's a credible alternative to a remote login to your main computer. You are still going to need to find an existing computer to plug this thing into though.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
First off, I think it's great that a distribution is doing this. If you're a Linux evangelist, I would imagine a Live-CD may not do everything you want to do.
But, the main point of this post is to ask how is this a viable alternative to a laptop? I always defined viable alternative as a product that offers a similiar product set designed to do the same job. How exactly is a hard drive loaded with Linux comprable to a laptop?
There is no way that an external hard drive is equivalent to a laptop. This thing doesn't have a keyboard or screen. What are you going to do on the plane, show it off to the other passengers? Viable alternative. mutter.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Very true unless there's no hard drive in the workstation. If everyone using it is also using this external HD one wouldn't be needed.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
...to grab the entire contents of a G5 at the Apple Store.
Say hello to my little sig.
Imagine ... a beowulf cluster of these.
Why don't you imagine a beowulf cluster of slashdot moderators modding you down instead...
Oh no! They're coming after me!!
Little Bricklets
RTFA, you and everyone else who said this ... the drive also comes with a mini-CD that contains a bootloader and a recovery program. If your computer can boot off CD (much more than 5%) it can boot the to the LaCie drive.
The Ezine Directory
USB 2 case (with keyboard power cable for those PC's with lame USB ports) $32 - Bascon Computers
Knoppix $0 - the web
Portability Priceless
Fits in your pocket, you can carry your system all the time. Most places are starting to care about USB drives so check before you plug in.
The nice thing is you always have your code, your custom toolchain, music, etc. Like you never left home.
(OK, so you have to set up Knoppix and that will take an hour or two, far less than it takes you to build that XP box from scratch) - ob Windows vs. Linux dig
- If the CD only needs to boot, load USB drivers, and hand off control to the USB drive, it can be shrunk to a business-card CD. I'm guessing that a business-card CD + 2.5" hard drive isn't any less convenient than one full-size CD.
- With 40GB available, you can have 58 times as many programs available as you can with a 700MB CD.
- Hard drives can be written to as well as read from, so you can use it to carry documents and MP3s along with you, and don't have to stream these over the network like you'd have to with Knoppix.
In short, it's waaaaay more functional than a bootable CD.It would be simple to use whatever system you come across as a linux system. Simply plug in the drive, boot, bootstrap, emerge system, compile a kernel, build some choice packages, wait a few days and voila, instant gentoo box.
-Note: this is a joke.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Actually it's more convenient, because most machines are able to boot off a CD by default, so you don't have to mess with the BIOS. Furthermore, it's a mini-CD, so it's not like it takes up a lot of extra room.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Myself, I gave up on modern "portables" some time back. Battery life sucks so bad, they always need to be plugged in. They heat up like a mo-fo. The keyboards invariably suck. And their hard drives are serious underperformers.
Since I need to plug in anyway, as a contractor, when I need to go on-site, I take my Shuttle XPC in a little cart, with a real buckling-spring UNICOMP keyboard. It's got 2GB of RAM and a fast CPU, can run VMWare handily so I can launch Winders from my Debian system as necessary.
I just use the monitor at whatever desk the client decides to assign me for the day.
If I carry a laptop any more it's a Tandy Model 102, and I just use it for editing text. Now that thing is portable... 20 hours on 4 AA batteries, passes the drop test, and has an excellent keyboard. I transfer files to/from via the serial port.
We're working on a memory/flash storage expansion for it at http://bitchin100.com/remem_project.html
-- John.
It needs hardware encryption so that the disk is useless without the right pass-phrase, and optionally a hardware token like a separate USB pendrive (or compact flash, whatever) with a really big one-time pad on it. And I mean real encryption like AES or Blowfish, or at least triple-DES. Not something that Joe-Bob and his little beowulf cluster can crack in a week or too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
With 40GB available, you can have 58 times [google.com] as many programs available as you can with a 700MB CD.
If we're talking typical case (knoppix) then since the harddrive likely won't be compressed, its only a matter of 20 times as many programs.
Moving on to the days of DVDs things are going to get even less impressive in that regard...
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Damn, it is hard to please the slashdot crowd. It's too expensive, how is this different from knoppix?
Well, I find it very inexpensive and convenient. Yes, I could probably do this myself, but I happen to like Mandrake's distribution and this gives me the chance to support my favorite distribution in an all-in-one package that is easy to use.
If you think you can do it reliably and more cheaply than Mandrake, please by all means give them some competition.
But I, for one, love Mandrake. It is the fastest distribution of the latest round I tried (Suse 9.1, Fedora 2, Slackware 10) and it is very stable. I also happen to like Suse 9.1 quite a bit for certain uses, but overall lean much more strongly towards Mandrake, but I digress.
I love this idea. You will be able to take your desktop with you everywhere without needing to use Knoppix. Knoppix is very nice, but this gives you another way to reach portability and will be faster since it runs off a HD, rather than off the CD. You can take music, documents with you and have your fully personalized desktop available anywhere where a computer is available.
This is more convenient than a laptop in some regards as it doesn't need to be recharged and is less conspicuous and thus less likely to be stolen.
And I don't know about you, but I can find a computer I can plug into just about anywhere, whether it's at a friend's or a relative's house, the library...
I think Mandrake is working very hard and they are making incredible progress. I have tested their 10.1 Beta 2 and it is already very, very good, although I would caution new users to wait for the *Official* release, not community, and definitely not RCs.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
One problem with those mini CDs, though - if you encounter a machine with a slot-load drive that can't boot off of USB, you can't boot the drake installation.
Well, you can try, but one would be an idiot to put any other than a full sized CD/DVD in a slotload drive - it may go in, but it probably isn't coming back out.
"I've never seen "USB" as an option in the "A, C, CDROM"
You young whipper-snappers with your "CD-ROM boot" and your "network boot" are all a bunch of sissies and don't know it! Why, back in my day you were given one option: floppy drive! Hard drives were too expensive and required a team of oxen to get the durned things spinning, so everything was on a truckload of floppy disks.
And when I say floppy, I mean floppy! Those things were flopper than you were when you walked in on your grandmother and I this morning! Have you ever tried putting a pancake into a disk drive?
Them rich snots down the street, they had one of them new-fangled "double density" drive. Managed to get PC-DOS down to less than half a dozen disks (unless you included GW-BASIC!). Us, we were stuck with single sided, single density. Do you have any idea how many of those it takes to fit just one Library of Congress on? Station wagons full!
"Network boot..." bah! We had a network! It didn't just look like a garden hose, it was a garden hose! We'd roll one of our floppy disks up and shove it in and blow it on through to our friends in order to share our music files!
You ever hear Asia being played by your internal speaker, boy?
Yes. A lot of people have installed the Mac OS 10.4 beta onto their iPod to avoid having to partition their HD. That way, they can boot whichever OS they like by holding Option while turning on their computer (Option displays a list of bootable devices and lets you select one).
Maybe when windoze is in airplane cockpits we'll have to worry about USB ports in chair arms. Maybe somebody will hijack the headrest-mounted Playstations. Oh, wait, I think playstations and DVDs are just in JAL/INA.
Imagine how bloody angry ms would be if someone placed windoze on USB sticks. That could really mess up ms' licensing scheme.
Regardless of which OS is on a USB stick, what really will become a problem is abusers who use customized "OS-Sticks" (a term I'm coining and will continue to use even if some big powerhouse pickes it up and tries to hijack it as their own...) to wreak havoc on the Kinko's and other places where computers might be carelessly (by then) be deployed with their peripherals ports left (physically) unsecured or left installed.
With an OS-Stick, the user's privileges are all in hand, unless the BIOS of more or all computers has control over the data flow and control of the machine.
"Firewall-in-a-BIOS", anyone?
David Syes
Let's start displaying Tux with a family (wife/partner/spouse/whatever (industry/standards bodies), along with offspring or adoptees (we users and adoptees/friends of FOSS/Linux/GPL, etc)...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"