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).

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.

Good for librarians too...

[macguys]

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.

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 ;-)

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.

Meaning of Ubuntu

[threaded]

I thought Ubuntu meant "Can't install Gentoo"?

Re:Meaning of Ubuntu

[outZider]

"No one wants to spend a week installing an operating system." :)

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...

Kinda stupid

[xenocide2]

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?

Puppy

[HermanAB]

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.

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.