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Taking Linux On The Road With Ubuntu

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the portable-happiness dept.

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."

4 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Internet Cafe by Sinus0idal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. SLOOOW.... by yourexhalekiss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Poor choice of name by tepples · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:You have to REALLY hate windows by bcrowell · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

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