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

3GB == Tiny?

[ergo98]

A 3GB drive is decidely un-tiny.

Re:3GB == Tiny?

[Homology]

A 3GB drive is decidely un-tiny.

Indeed, but when the article suggest to put install applications like OpenOffice, Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Firefox along with Evolution and rest of the Gnome desktop, you sure need those 3GB. Perhaps the reviewer was refering to the physical size of the drive as small ;-)

Internet Cafe

[Sinus0idal]

Ok, but which correctly configured public machines (schools, uni's, internet cafes etc) are going to let you boot from a usb device? Allowing booting from other media can create havoc for admins.

Re:Internet Cafe

[ctr2sprt]

It's feasible. Think of it like this. Clearly the computing labs aren't trusted, or you wouldn't have to authenticate and the schools wouldn't have to regulate or monitor your traffic. Students are trying to get to computers which are trusted, namely the proxy and other internal servers. So what do you usually use to go from an untrusted network to a trusted one? A VPN. It'll handle authentication and do encryption to boot. As an added bonus, it can be set up to allow connections from the wider Internet as well, so students can access class materials and such from home and not just the public labs.

It will require students to install VPN clients on their "mobile OSes," but I don't think that's an unreasonable demand to make.

SLOOOW....

[yourexhalekiss]

4400 RPM Hard Drive... 4-5 minute boot time? Ouch. Seriously, this reminds me of a LiveCD of some kind. I love the idea and think that some people will find the H2 invaluable, but to me it just doesn't seem very practical.

Poor choice of name

[tepples]

The name "H2" definitely doesn't scream "efficient" to a lot of people. In fact, another product called "H2", a gas-guzzling SUV designed as a military-style façade on a Chevy Tahoe engine, has shown itself to be worthy of the F-bomb: Fsck you and the Hummer you rode in on.

Blackdog

[drrjv]

Doesn't the Blackdog Server do it even better?

http://www.projectblackdog.com/

When you can't reboot? Portable Apps

[CritterNYC]

I like the idea of taking along a full OS on a portable drive. They should consider adding a virtual machine that runs under Windows and can boot it. Then, you can use it in locations where rebooting would be an issue (internet cafes, at work, on mom's PC).

Until something like that comes along... and doesn't have a 5 minute startup timeframe... I'll stick to Portable Apps.

(Full disclosure: Yes, that's my website.)

Mediocre Experience

[Seumas]

I'm been a Debian-only guy since early 2002 and when it was time to get a new laptop, I decided to go with Ubuntu, because of that "heritage". Unfortunately, it still had a lot of problems that are not entirely due to Ubuntu itself. Problems such as it never remembering the wifi card and network, so it'd have to be setup every time you logged into Ubuntu. Problems like there not being any solid driver's for the graphics card (unless you wanted 2D only - even screensavers chugged the 2.4ghz, 2gb RAM, 128mb ATI 9800 system down to a crawl.

There were a number of other issues, too. In the end, I wiped it and gave it to my brother as a Windows system for school. I could probably have resolved all the little issues with a bunch of elbow grease, but I don't have that kind of time and thought maybe Ubuntu was ready for prime-time easier-than-redhat installation. (Or at least, what I'm told is easy -- I haven't used Redhat except for a couple months back in 1997).

All in all, I was impressed with Ubuntu and I think it shows great promise of all the current desktop distros. And frankly, as long as you still have apt-get, what's not to like? :)

Re:Mediocre Experience

[Rakishi]

"128mb ATI 9800 system"

ATI is well known to have shitty Linux drivers, if you wish to complain then please send a letter to ATI asking them to make better linux drivers. In general, for desktop linux you need to pick hardware which will work with it.

The Ubuntu H2 can be ordered online here.

[herve76]

The Ubuntu H2 is on sale at: http://www.zinside.com/index.php?main_page=product _info&products_id=46

This is a nifty idea, but not really practical

[WestCanadaCitizen.ca]

I love Ubuntu and I've ran it on my desktop and my notebook for almost a year now without a hitch, but I don't see the upside to using it for this application. Portable units like this are generally used for rescue service or showing off Linux to would be converts. And although Ubuntu has good hardware support, etc. it's not an overly zippy distro to begin with so running it off of a USB hard drive is going to slow it down so much that anyone watching you wait for 4 minutes to boot up your new, supposedly better OS is going to laugh at you and run back to Windows (especially when they see the default Ubuntu theme). As far as rescue service goes, Knothing Beats Knoppix. So I'm just wondering what niche this would fit into.

Re:You have to REALLY hate windows

[bcrowell]

A: Hey, thanks for letting my stay at your place while I'm here in town. I really appreciate it.

B: No problem, it's great to get a chance to get together. The spare bed's all made up.

A: Oh yeah, could I use your computer tonight? I have some work I need to do.

B: Yeah, no problem.

A: I have all my data here on this keychain drive. Do you have Gimp, Scribus, emacs, pdftk, ImageMagick, and Inkscape installed?

B: Huh? No.

A: Oh, no problem, it'll just take a few minutes to install them with apt-get.

B: Apt-what?

A: Oh, you don't run Debian? That's cool, what distro do you use?

B: Windows XP.

A: Oh...I guess I'll go out and buy copies of Photoshop, PageMaker, InDesign, and Illustrator to install on your machine. Shouldn't be more than a thousand bucks, total, and I don't think it'll be too much work to convert all the files, work on them, and convert them back again.

Re:Puppy

[Anonymous Coward]

That is 24 times smaller and it also does everything you need and it boots about 10 times faster too.

How is it you already know "everything I need"?

It doesn't, actually, seem to have all (or even most) of the applications I need on a computer. It does have a lot of games, though. Draw your own conclusions...

Re:You have to REALLY hate windows

[darkwhite]

Actually, that's what laptops are for