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Debian Hardware

Taking Linux On The Road With Ubuntu 184

Posted by ScuttleMonkey 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."
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Taking Linux On The Road With Ubuntu More

Taking Linux On The Road With Ubuntu

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  • 3GB == Tiny? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by ergo98 ( 9391 )
    A 3GB drive is decidely un-tiny.

  • Gotta Love Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)

    by JoeShmoe950 ( 605274 ) <CrazyNorman@gmail.com> on Sunday November 13, 2005 @03:32PM (#14021361) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by arkhan_jg ( 618674 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @04:21PM (#14021619)
      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.

  • Internet Cafe (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sinus0idal ( 546109 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @03:32PM (#14021368)
    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 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by halcyon1234 ( 834388 )
      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.

      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... o

      • Re:Internet Cafe (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jacksonj04 ( 800021 )
        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
        • Never heard of transparent proxies? Never hear of radius? There are solutions out there.
        • 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.

          Much the same in Canada, but that doesn't mean it won't work. As an example, I go to Seneca College. In order to use any of their PCs, you have to log into them with your college username/password. OR, if you bring in your own com

        • Re:Internet Cafe (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ctr2sprt ( 574731 )
          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 Inter
          • At this point, aren't you just as well off telling users, "Just use a laptop," and having ethernet jacks in the wall or wifi? That way you aren't putting your own computer hardware at risk. Yes, hardware can be reasonably-well protected, just as a network can be reasonably-well secured, but it would be much cheaper and easier in my opinion to just offer up tables, chairs, wifi and ethernet jacks, and allow users to use the stuff they already have (P3 laptops can be had for ~$200 on eBay... which is not *t

        • Wouldn't
          export http_proxy="http://user:pass@proxy.domain:port" work?
          It does for me. Apt, synaptic, and aptitude all work just fine. Of course, you still have to tell firefox about the proxy.

          • Yes, but just because you and I know how to set a proxy doesn't necessarily mean that everybody knows how to. I have seen people open Internet Explorer, type "Yahoo" in the address bar, and use the MSN search results to find Yahoo to search for what they were looking for.
            • "I have seen people open Internet Explorer, type "Yahoo" in the address bar, and use the MSN search results to find Yahoo to search for what they were looking for."

              When I see something like that, I just quit watching . . .

          • I seriously doubt that would work with NTLM based authentication, which most IIS/ISA Proxy Servers would be set-up to use.

            -Jar.
      • </i>
        but you can have mine ;)
    • There is actually a product called the Black Dog [projectblackdog.com] which is apparently somewhat similar: A Linux distro (Debian-based in this case) on a USB drive, except that the Black Dog acts as the computer, and when you plug it in it essentially turns the host into a dumb terminal (assuming it's running GNU/Linux, Windows or Mac OS X), presumably running an X server via the autorun feature on Windows or manually on GNU/Linux and MacOS X. I'm somewhat interested in one of these things (it'd be very useful!), but there do

  • Good for librarians too... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by macguys ( 472025 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @03:33PM (#14021379) Homepage
    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.

    • I fully expect a new law that makes USB ports on public computers illegal.

      I really would hope to see the opposite... The PC has no hard drive and if you want writeable media you can burn a disk, read/write you need a stick. The facility can offer you a read-only image on loan to boot or you can bring your own if, say, you need a specific app.

      Spamming type activities should be prevented by upstream limits or port blocking (dropped by arrangement only - for large file transfer perhaps), and any 'nasty

  • Other Distros? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by n0dalus ( 807994 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @03:35PM (#14021389) Journal
    Does this device work with other distros too?

    • Re:Other Distros? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Damn Small Linux can be installed to a USB flash/pen drive, which would probably run faster due to being no moving parts, and be less expensive to optain that the H2 mini harddrive...
      • Thanks for that (I'd never heard of Damn Small Linux before), I know a couple of netwoks (including my uni one) that alow me to boot from alternate devices, a small distro is a great Idea, it'll eaisly fit on my old pen drive, giving it a new lease of life.

  • SLOOOW.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by yourexhalekiss ( 833943 ) <herp.derpstep@com> on Sunday November 13, 2005 @03:39PM (#14021412) Homepage
    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.
    • Yeah the only removable storage media I've been seriously considering is SATA. However, the amount of systems with externally available SATA ports is pretty small. One of those new 7200RPM laptop drives with a SATA drive enclosure would probably be a light-enough/fast-enough removable-bootable media.

    • I feel where you are coming from. I think I would have a lot of little uses for this but still it would be slow.

      Scary thing is thinking about the new Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad Tablet PC. That costs over $2000 and has a 4200RPM HD.

    • 4400 RPM Hard Drive... 4-5 minute boot time?

      I skimmed through the article and towards the end there is a graph of the throughput of this drive. It seems to max out at around 8 MB/sec. It is probably the slowest 4200 RPM hard drive you will be likely to find since the platters are so small. A 3.5 inch drive and a 1 inch drive using the same technology will both have save bit density.

      I am sure the platters are not quite these sizes, but... The outter most track on a 3.5 inch platter is nearly 11 inc

      • That is precisely what it is... a live cd on read/write media.

        Yeah, and as much as I like Ubuntu in general, I have to say that their live CD is about the slowest thing I've ever seen in terms of boot speed. Debootstrap was never meant to "go there" ;)

  • Poor choice of name (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples.gmail@com> on Sunday November 13, 2005 @03:46PM (#14021446) Homepage Journal

    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 [fuh2.com].

    • Funny, I always think of molecular hydrogen.

      If you want to count by numbers, I think that the count of hydrogen molecules are a wee bit ahead of Hummers. Also by date, since hydrogen appeared a bit after the Big Bang (although it took a bit to cool enough for molecular form), while the Hummer H2 was released in 2003 C.E..

      I'd imagine that hydrogen has less of an advertising budget since 2003, however.

      --
      Evan

    • Just read your H2 site, and I have to say: Jesus Christ what a big baby you are.

      Go find a worthy cause to get all pissy over.

  • Meaning of Ubuntu (Score:5, Funny)

    by threaded ( 89367 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @03:48PM (#14021462) Homepage
    I thought Ubuntu meant "Can't install Gentoo"?

  • Great, but not the first distribution to do so (Score:3, Informative)

    by plankrwf ( 929870 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @03:48PM (#14021464)
    Nice idea, from Ubuntu. But they are certainly not the first. Of course, there is Knoppix [knopper.net], 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 [damnsmalllinux.org]), which only takes 50Mb of space...

  • USB Live HDD (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ebooher ( 187230 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @03:49PM (#14021467) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This concept would be much better implemented by creating a special Ubuntu live cd to look at a usb flash disk for the /home partition or even to save all settings like http://puppylinux.org/ [puppylinux.org]

    Not all old machines can even boot from usb, and the install on a flash disk approach doesn't make since Ubuntu would need to be resinstalled every time to get everything set up properly for the hardware that you booted with. For example, if you install Ubuntu on a machine with an nvidia video card, then try to boot th

  • Blackdog (Score:2, Insightful)

    by drrjv ( 708816 )
    Doesn't the Blackdog Server do it even better?

    http://www.projectblackdog.com/ [projectblackdog.com]
    • that is truly amazing, I have envisioned something like that for years. Compared to a live cd with usb flash solution it is going to be slower and more expensive. However, not having to reboot the host machine is priceless. It will also run on a windows machine with crappy windows-only hardware. I'd like to see what the real world performance is like.
      • Being the proud owner of a Blackdog, I can answer that question. The performance is great, on the right computer. Currently Windows support is WinXP SP2 only, no other versions work. A lot of home users have XP, and should be at the latest version, so thats great when you are at your Aunts house and want to do something geeky. However, the BD would be very useful in corporate/server environments where XP isn't so widespread, so its usefuless is diminished.

        Linux support is better, although takes a bit of

  • When you can't reboot? Portable Apps (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CritterNYC ( 190163 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @04:08PM (#14021557) Homepage
    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 [johnhaller.com].

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

  • Kinda stupid (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xenocide2 ( 231786 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @04:15PM (#14021591) Homepage
    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 [tomshardware.com], 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?

  • Device drivers (Score:2, Informative)

    by d1rty_d0gg_ ( 875482 )
    This would be a cool idea if the distro supported a sufficiently large number of device drivers. That way you could boot off this USB drive and expect all the hardware on the host to be discovered. Knoppix would be the ideal choice for this sort of a thing. IBM tried something similar [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] with Knoppix to allow users to carry the state of their OS around on portable storage.
  • its an idea that has been around for alt least 8 years, probably more like 20.
    It's nice to see others comming up with it too, as that keeps it from being bitch slapped with patent crap.

    The smaller the OS the more room you potentially have for applications and data.

    Its obvious that technology allows storage media to get smaller in size, bigger in space and faster in access.

    This is where virus, worm and whatever badness can be stopped cold in its tracks.

    Whan you have write protected media to hold the OS and a
    • Hardware drivers that is. Taking the OS with you is only possible if it contains all hardware drivers it may ever need (Loading them from the "stationary" part is not a good idea, since all benefits would then be void), and taking only rudimentary ones isn't good, you need working scanners, printers, graphics, sound, etc.
      And, to be absoluetely safe, you'd need to carry the BIOS on that stick too + have a way to determine there is no malware abstraction-layer between your USB port (that's where the problems

  • Puppy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HermanAB ( 661181 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @04:27PM (#14021639)
    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.
    • 3GB??? What the heck? That is small, cheap and convenient nowadays?

      A 60G iPod is equally cheap and convenient. Just not as small.

    • Mepis on the go (Score:3, Interesting)

      by twitter ( 104583 )
      Mepis on the go uses a CD for the OS and USB for your home. This way, you get a fat distribution and a big writable space. The penalty is speed, which Puppy overcomes.

      The more options you have, the better things are.

  • Mediocre Experience (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Seumas ( 6865 )
    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 A
    • "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.

  • This is a nifty idea, but not really practical (Score:3, Insightful)

    by WestCanadaCitizen.ca ( 930764 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @04:42PM (#14021700) Homepage
    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.
    • I don't see the upside to using it for this application
      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 (

  • When we store all our data remotely, and can reinstall our SW environment with apt-get against our packages configs, we can have our entire familiar desktop wherever our way has been paved with all those "legacy WinTel" machines. These thumbdrives are the key to the hiway.

  • Nice one (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FishandChips ( 695645 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @07:21PM (#14022589) Journal
    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.

  • Time (Score:2, Interesting)

    by solarlips ( 98093 )
    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 la

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