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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."
I've been following the issues that many librarians have with having to be part of government snooping of internet logs on their patrons. By using Linux live distros like Ubantu, this problem seems to go away. If the snoops want to snoop, they can do so further upstream and not involve the librarians.
Of course, I fully expect a new law that makes USB ports on public computers illegal.
wherever I go, there I am.
Does this device work with other distros too?
Actually, this could be one of the best things to happen to network admins in a long time. Right now, a network admin has to spend ungodly amounts of time going to local machine after local machine to install patches, fix registry errors, change /etc settings... or to run ghost floppies to restore the machine... or to set up remote scripts to do any or all of the above automatically. Basically, a royal crapton of time is spent on local OS maintenance.
If the admin were to just yank out the internal hard drive, and set the boot order to "USB / CDROM / FLOPPY", their lives become much easier. Instead of "Here's a huge list of things you are not allowed to do on the computers because it might ruin our installed OS", they can just say "Hey, do whatever you want. It's your own OS. If you muck it up, you have to fix it."
It will suddenly create two new markets as well. First, people who fix portable OS installs will see a resurgance of business. (As always, those of us who know better can just drop the 2.5GB backup of the OS image we have on our home machine back onto the USB key). Second, it will create a great secondary market for 10GB hard drives. Why bother spending the extra $100+ on a huge hard drive for a machine if it isn't needed? Just put a small hard drive in each machine that the user can mount for swap space. (I know that ever company I've worked for has had a gigantic stack of unused 2GB - 4GB hard drives in their storage closets).
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Another thing people could do if a machine doesn't have a BIOS that is USB boot friendly is mirror the /boot structure on a 3" mini-cdr and keep that in the case with the drive. Set the Live CD up so that it seeks out the USB drive for /usr /home /etc partitions.
The $140 price tag is a little steep for me to have something I'd only use as a toy, though. With USB keys as cheap as they are right now, I'm not sure how well the market will accept this today.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
Won't work. Companies and schools (at least in the UK) are accountable for what is done on their networks. Just having dumb terminals doesn't help this.
For schools especially, all internet access must be monitored, and schools in Leeds (Which ain't a small city) use an individual-user-login based service. This means a proxy server, and most kids wouldn't know what a proxy server was if it came up and slapped them in the face.
I'd love to be able to run a portable distro in school, but at the moment it's just not feasable. Even our own laptops have to be forced through the proxy to do anything useful.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
From what I can tell this is just some retail company that decided to throw in one of those free Ubuntu discs with a microdrive, rather than anything officially supported by Ubuntu / Cannoical. Still interesting, but a little bit less newsworthy when you discover that a) the "pre-installed" OS is not pre-installed, and b) it takes 4 minutes to boot.
When you look at the graph, you see that you're getting less than 10MB/sec. Two questions: what are the numbers on the bottom referring to, and why does the graph look like it does? Is there some caching mechanism going on?
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Open Source Sysadmin
3GB??? What the heck? That is small, cheap and convenient nowadays?
Puppy Linux runs off a 128MB USB memory stick. That is 24 times smaller and it also does everything you need and it boots about 10 times faster too.
Oh well, what the hell...
Say I'm traveling, and I don't want to lug a laptop with me. With this thing, I could run emacs, gimp, etc., in internet cafes or at friends' houses.
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).
Last time I tried Knoppix, the performance wasn't any better than what they're quoting in this article.
It's going to be really cool when CD drives and/or USB drives like this get fast enough that there's no longer any performance hit. It could really make a drastic change in the way we think about using computers. Computers could become interchangeable utility boxes.
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Kudos to the developers. I guess this is more for experimenters and early adopters but it's great to see. There are surely going to be a great many experiments along these lines in the next few years. Whover gets the paradigm right is going to be making billions, most likely: intelligent key -> dumb terminal -> network -> master server running back the apps, with everything just the way you like it from your preferences data. As with mobile phones, I guess the keys/thumb drives would end up being almost given away to secure a monthly network subscription. Hmmn, tasty. Flash memory will need to change and improve first, though. We'll need masses of it, and cheap.
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tournoun pas maï
The more options you have, the better things are.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I used to be a Linux advocate / snob citing stability and coolness as my reasons for using it. Honestly, I find that Linux holds me back from doing simple things that I take for granted on Windows. To get many apps to properly run I needed to download its package making sure that I installed the correct dependencies beforehand. I was definitely not a Linux power user, more of an advanced beginner. (Yes, I know there are programs to resolve the dependency issue automatically.)
Open Office just seems to lag compared to Microsoft Office, and its memory utilization is huge. I'm also an avid porn junky; when I was using Linux trying to playback various media types was a pain, downloading appropriate packages again... and every so often not having a certain media supported. With Media Player I can do everything with 1 hand!
I haven't played with Linux for a while, but until I find a distribution that has a great office package and media player I won't be switching. Tom's Hardware cites instability... as a reason to use Linux; Win XP seems to be pretty darn stable when I use it. The time that it takes to setup a Linux distribution and get the same feel for it that I have with Windows would amount to a lot more time than the time I'm setback by Windows crashing. Plus a 4 minute boot time with this Ubuntu / H2 setup is nuts.
This is where OSX bridges the gap, a commonplace OS with standards and the benefit of Unix. I can run Microsoft Word and have the ability to compile just about any Linux app. Maybe Microsoft should take a similar move as Apple did in developing OSX. Completely redo their OS and base it on BSD... create a good emulator (Wine like) to appease software developers for the meantime and stray away from the old Win32 development stuff. This way they could corral the whole Unix / Linux threat and create an OS that appeals to all parties. Then again why should the dominant player by leaps and bounds in any industry have to do something so massive, they don't have to.
this is a great concept, but these drives are made by a comany called cornice. The company i work for has sold these drives (w/o ubuntu) for a few months. Many of them have gone bad.
I'd recommend a good flash drive set to boot slax, feather, or dsl. (Much faster too)