Taking Linux On The Road With Ubuntu

Zebrahead writes "Tom's Hardware has a nice review of the Ubuntu H2. How about storing your operating system, including some applications, on a highly mobile device? This is exactly what the Ubuntu H2 was designed for. In theory, the Ubuntu H2 package can be run on virtually any computer that has at least one empty USB port. A tiny 1" hard drive with 3 GB capacity was teamed up with the Debian-based Linux distribution Ubuntu. Bundling a tiny storage device with a fully-featured open source operating system enables the user to take a system installation, all its settings and applications, and a limited amount of data with him. It would be great to take this pretty interesting product to an Internet café, a computer at a friend's location, or any other system you can think of."

Comments

Re:3GB == Tiny?

[punkdigerati]

I believe the Tiny was in reference to the one inch size, not the capacity.

Gotta Love Ubuntu

[JoeShmoe950]

I think this is a great concept, and I must say, I love ubuntu, but what about hardware conflicts. Not just with ubuntu, but with Linux in general, i've always had trouble with the combination of a PCI GeForce and integrated graphics conflicting. This can be a real pain. Any solution for thigns like this?

Re:Gotta Love Ubuntu

[arkhan_jg]

Depends what you're trying to do. If you only want the PCI geforce working, your best bet is simply to disable the onboard graphics in the BIOS.

If you wanted both onboard and PCI graphics card to work (in some form of xinerama setup), set the PCI card to be the default display device in the BIOS, as opposed to AGP (most onboard video chips are classed as AGP devices in the BIOS). A number of PCI graphics cards aren't happy unless they're the first video device to be initialised.

Once you've got the card running, you can use either the opensource nv driver that ships as part of Xorg, or you can use the closed source drivers from nvidia that are custom compiled for your distro. You need the closed-source licenced drivers to do 3D-acceleration properly, but for basic 2D work the nv drivers are fine. Depends on your distro how best to do this - ubuntu does have support for the closed-source drivers, but I believe it's a bit of a pain to get working.

As part of the wider picture though, I've always been amazed by the hardware-detection and support on linux LiveCDs (or indeed, the H2). Given the lack of co-operation from hardware manufacturers, the amount of machines that work perfectly well 'out of the box' (i.e. without manually installing drivers) is much higher than windows XP; sata drive support, for example.

Re:Gotta Love Ubuntu

[RAMMS EIN]

``Depends on your distro how best to do this - ubuntu does have support for the closed-source drivers, but I believe it's a bit of a pain to get working.''

I did this on someone else's box recently, and it's actually a matter of just installing the right package (from Synaptic).

Great, but not the first distribution to do so

[plankrwf]

Nice idea, from Ubuntu. But they are certainly not the first. Of course, there is Knoppix , which runs Live from a CD. It might be made ready for USB stick also. And there are other distributions that fit on and are build for a 128Mb USB stick; for instance 'Damn Small Linux' ( DSL ), which only takes 50Mb of space...

Re:Other Distros?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn Small Linux can be installed to a USB flash/pen drive, which would probably run faster due to being no moving parts, and be less expensive to optain that the H2 mini harddrive...

Device drivers

[d1rty_d0gg_]

This would be a cool idea if the distro supported a sufficiently large number of device drivers. That way you could boot off this USB drive and expect all the hardware on the host to be discovered. Knoppix would be the ideal choice for this sort of a thing. IBM tried something similar [slashdot.org] with Knoppix to allow users to carry the state of their OS around on portable storage.

Re:SLOOOW....

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a terrible boot time. They really would be better off using a compressed filesystem, like the live CDs do, since almost any computer these days will be able to decompress the data quicker than it can be transferred, thus effectively giving you an 2-3x improvement in data transfer rate and you would get a lot more free space for your data to boot.

For running a distro when you only have a limited amount of space I'd recommend using SLAX, it's small, fast and can run from RAM and can be easily customized using modules. If space is really limited Puppy Linux is nice aswell and packs a lot into it's small size, but a bit too stripped down for it to be comfortable for me.

Myself, I've got SLAX booting from my portable 2.5" hard drive, but I'm gonna get myself a 1GB MP3 player, with a little space set aside for SLAX and make a bootable credit card CD incase the computer doesn't support USB booting, this way it won't be a pain to take with me in case I need it since I'll hardly have to carry anything extra.

Re:You have to REALLY hate windows

[say]

Could I suggest a USB stick with Firefox for windows binaries, configured to run with the profile directory on the stick; bash for windows and putty.exe? It would fit on a 32MB stick, depending on what your few utilities are. It would run a minimal GUI, Windows' is kinda minimal until Vista hits gold.

Re:Good for librarians too...

[level_headed_midwest]

Why would this make USB ports illegal? If you want to prevent booting from USB devices, simply put the boot order in the BIOS below that of the HDD. With the average newer computer, set the boot order to be such and password the BIOS.

1. Network
2. HDD
3. Floppy
4. CD-ROM/DVD
5. USB

You have to have another computer to do a netboot, so having HDD in order above the optical, floppy, and USB prevents people from using live OSes but still allows the admin on the network to boot if the installed OS fails. And if the admin needed to do other work, hey, he should know the BIOS password and can change boot order.

Or they could use an older computer (like mine) that can't boot from USB. Most library computers I have seen are so old that they might not even *have* USB ports.