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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."
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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