GlobeTrotter: Mandrake-based 40GB Linux Mobile Desktop 199
joestar writes "Mandrakesoft & LaCie have just launched "GlobeTrotter", a ultra-compact 40 GB bootable USB hard-drive pre-loaded with Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official. It may be plugged to any available PC with a USB 1 or USB 2 port, automatically recognizes the host-PC's hardware, and then is ready to use. Multiple uses can be imagined, from the office/internet workstation to the multimedia jukebox! The concept is quite similar to Mandrakemove, excepted that it's way more powerful than a USB-key based system! And for $219 it's a credible alternative to a laptop."
Alternative to a laptop? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Alternative to a laptop? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe because it's not a laptop. It's a HD with Mandrake preloaded onto it. You plug it into a desktop so you can run Mandrake anywhere.
Re:Alternative to a laptop? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Alternative to a laptop? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just have a machine without hard drive at each location and take the usb drive.
Otherwise, yes, you could hardly rely on there being available host hardware without password-protected BIOS setups available wherever you want to use it.
Re:Alternative to a laptop? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure on the speeds you'd get across USB2, but this is also USB1 compatible and I don't think you'd want your swap mounted on it. Nope, you're right and you don't need to qualify it. This is no alternative to a laptop.
And if the purpose of it was to have portability of software and data, well I have an email client running from a pen-drive and it also stores a few spreadsheets and Word documents. I've not found much else I actually need to carry from computer to computer for rountine work.
I'd say the best use for this is demoing a linux system to clients.
It ain't a laptop. It is linux on windows machines (Score:2)
Pretty smart. I could of course lug my own laptop around but that is a lot more expensive and you will be working on a laptop. Not a high end pc.
This is more like knoppix but with its own HD for easy storage of preferences and adding new applications.
sounds like an easy way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:3, Insightful)
Use a Win2K drive with l0phtCrack (LC5)
Hack the target drive Administrator password
Remove Win2K drive
Boot Windows with Admin password.
Reset user password (with the NTFS encryption).
Login with hacked user.
Remove NTFS encryption.
Copy decrypted contents to your Win2K drive.
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember, if someone with reasonable IT skills gets to sit in front of a machine with no-one watching, and has bootable media, it isn't that hard for them to get full access to the system. If the files are all encrypted the password file can still be taken away and cracked over time.
I've had a few things delivered where the vendor didn't supply the root password (probably sound
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2)
Unless the admin is l33t enough to know that you can disable booting from anything but the hard drive from the BIOS, and keep this setting from being changed with a BIOS password.
Of course you can always (break) open the c
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2)
Every admin knows that, but most prefer physical security. When you have a failure and can't get the password you have a paperweight, which is OK if it's only a PC - or OK if a few people have the BIOS passwords and it's also kept in a safe place offsite. In today's IT market you cannot assume that you will be in any one place for the life of the hardware, or even that the hardware will remain on site. Tha
Yes and no. (Score:3, Interesting)
Very true unless there's no hard drive in the workstation. If everyone using it is also using this external HD one wouldn't be needed.
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:4, Informative)
yes, all you need is a command prompt (msdos boot disk) then type:
DEBUG
and hit Enter. You'll see a dash (-) at the DEBUG prompt. Now type:
o 70 2e
which will show as -o 70 2e at the DEBUG prompt. Hit Enter. Then type:
o 71 ff
and hit Enter. Finally type:
Q
that is one of the ways, there are a few others. don't work in all situations, but will work in most i've had to deal with.
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2)
Many thanks for the interesting know-how, though.
Do you think this procedure (provided I could boot into DOS) would work for a ThinkPad?
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2)
using debug on hardware ports doesn't usually work under NT series, hence XP should be immune to that.
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2)
Well, I do have admin rights to this Win2K laptop, and yet the kernel did not allow any writes to the ports performed by debug. Interestingly, debug does not complain, and within the session, you can even read back the values you wrote to the port. But one you close and re-open the session, the value is gone and the old one is in place.
In other words: you are very right. Too bad, as my laptop is locked down by the otherwise incompetent IM, not allowing me to boot some rather mor
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:sounds like an easy way... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's much harder to log remote desktop connections.
So in answer to your question, most companies with any real admin would log it, even for the simple case of 'you say your system is unstable, but it's only rebooted once a day without any program crashes'
YAY (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this is great. Not only can you take along your preferred operating system, but your files, too.
Maybe my hardware is old, but can most boxes boot off USB these days?
Re:YAY (Score:2)
Re:YAY (Score:2)
1x nForce2 mobo = $30
1x Athlon = $50
1x case with cheap PSU = $50
1x 256M RAM = $30
The hard drive seems to be the most expensive part of a computer these days. (unless you have 1024M of ECC RAM... that will also take a piece of your wallet...)
Re:YAY (Score:2)
Re:YAY (Score:2)
Re:YAY (Score:3, Informative)
Been there, done that (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Been there, done that (Score:2)
OSX has better support for functions like this. Not only does most apple hardware that can run OSX support firewire booting, but also the operating system itself stores all custom configuration data in the user's home directory under ~/Library. So, if you just want a roaming home directory on an external hard drive that's really easy to do, assuming you stick to built-in apps.
However, in this case the end-user is completely booting Mandrake from the external USB drive, much like you would boot Knoppix fr
Re:Been there, done that (Score:2)
Might be a feature of Tiger.
Re:Been there, done that (Score:2)
Not to mention the fact that if you encounter a Mac, chances are that Mac OS X will already be on it; there isn't much point in booting into a *different* copy of OS X just to sit and surf the net or other tasks. You could just use the existing sys
Re:Been there, done that (Score:2)
Seriously this as been possible for years now, the news is that a company is selling it.
Costly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Costly? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Secure a steady supply of hardware to meet demand.
2. Install and configure the OS on the hardware.
3. Write a manual.
4. Provide tech support for the product.
5. Market the new product.
6. Profit.
Re:Costly? (Score:2)
The default theme mandrake comes with is ugly too...
Re:Costly? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Costly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just so you know, every 3.5" drive enclosure I've ever seen requires a separate power supply. 3.5" disks require too much power to be reliably run from USB or firewire. This is one reason why a 2.5" drive solution is much better for portability.
So, take $130 of hardware and add $90 for my time to put the drive in the enclosure, install Mandrake, etc. and it doesn't seem like such a bad deal to me.
Re:Costly? (Score:2)
Check pricewatch. This is before bulk discounts.
Second, $90 for your work. How? I can buy assembled
usb drive for $90 and now I just write a little
script to format and rawrite the drive. None of
this requires any thinking so even in the US it
would be a minimum wage job to plug drives into
USB and press a button, then package. So more
realistically $5 for putting Mandrake on it.
If they give you Mandrake support with it then that
could be worth $40. So I think a fai
Re:Costly? (Score:2)
Now we should be waiting for standard hard drives that come with Linux preinstalled-this could be a great boost to Linux acceptance.
speed ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
anyone else... (Score:2)
because a drive that imagines users to use it would probably make for a better selling product than a mobile USB drive.
"For computers that don't support booting from USB (Score:4, Insightful)
Carrying along a bootable CD and a USB storage device sort of defeats the purpose.
Loadlin would be a natural for this thing...
Me neither. (Score:2)
It sure will be sweet when this is mainstream; boot up a copy of whatever OS and do some troubleshooting or virus removal. Or even just some easy file copies.
Re:Me neither. (Score:2)
Re:"For computers that don't support booting from (Score:5, Interesting)
- If the CD only needs to boot, load USB drivers, and hand off control to the USB drive, it can be shrunk to a business-card CD. I'm guessing that a business-card CD + 2.5" hard drive isn't any less convenient than one full-size CD.
- With 40GB available, you can have 58 times [google.com] as many programs available as you can with a 700MB CD.
- Hard drives can be written to as well as read from, so you can use it to carry documents and MP3s along with you, and don't have to stream these over the network like you'd have to with Knoppix.
In short, it's waaaaay more functional than a bootable CD.Re:"For computers that don't support booting from (Score:2, Interesting)
If we're talking typical case (knoppix) then since the harddrive likely won't be compressed, its only a matter of 20 times as many programs.
Moving on to the days of DVDs things are going to get even less impressive in that regard...
Re:"For computers that don't support booting from (Score:2)
While I'm here posting, just thought I'd link to NewEgg's huge selection of 2.5 " enclosures [newegg.com], the model numbers really makes it easy to research them.
Re:"For computers that don't support booting from (Score:2)
Re:"For computers that don't support booting from (Score:3, Funny)
Well, you can try, but one would be an idiot to put any other than a full sized CD/DVD in a slotload drive - it may go in, but it probably isn't coming back out.
Re:"For computers that don't support booting from (Score:2)
Re:"For computers that don't support booting from (Score:5, Funny)
You young whipper-snappers with your "CD-ROM boot" and your "network boot" are all a bunch of sissies and don't know it! Why, back in my day you were given one option: floppy drive! Hard drives were too expensive and required a team of oxen to get the durned things spinning, so everything was on a truckload of floppy disks.
And when I say floppy, I mean floppy! Those things were flopper than you were when you walked in on your grandmother and I this morning! Have you ever tried putting a pancake into a disk drive?
Them rich snots down the street, they had one of them new-fangled "double density" drive. Managed to get PC-DOS down to less than half a dozen disks (unless you included GW-BASIC!). Us, we were stuck with single sided, single density. Do you have any idea how many of those it takes to fit just one Library of Congress on? Station wagons full!
"Network boot..." bah! We had a network! It didn't just look like a garden hose, it was a garden hose! We'd roll one of our floppy disks up and shove it in and blow it on through to our friends in order to share our music files!
You ever hear Asia being played by your internal speaker, boy?
Re:"For computers that don't support booting from (Score:2)
I've heard quite a lot played through the internal speaker, there was a program called "pianoman" which included a large library of tunes. Find it in the Simtel archive.
Hint: You didn't need your OS to include BASICA / GWBASIC if you had a real IBM, since it was in ROM and would start if no bootable media were found. Others who ripped IBM's boot code but couldn't steal BASIC because of copyright would fail with
Re:"For computers that don't support booting from (Score:2)
and then it's just completely missing from some, but some fairly 'old' computers have the option while some a bit more modern don't.
Boot off USB (Score:2)
Re:Boot off USB (Score:2)
Credible alternative to a laptop? (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps it's a credible alternative to a remote login to your main computer. You are still going to need to find an existing computer to plug this thing into though.
Viable alternative to a laptop? (Score:5, Interesting)
But, the main point of this post is to ask how is this a viable alternative to a laptop? I always defined viable alternative as a product that offers a similiar product set designed to do the same job. How exactly is a hard drive loaded with Linux comprable to a laptop?
You must be smoking a viable alternative to crack (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You must be smoking a viable alternative to cra (Score:5, Informative)
Since I need to plug in anyway, as a contractor, when I need to go on-site, I take my Shuttle XPC in a little cart, with a real buckling-spring UNICOMP keyboard. It's got 2GB of RAM and a fast CPU, can run VMWare handily so I can launch Winders from my Debian system as necessary.
I just use the monitor at whatever desk the client decides to assign me for the day.
If I carry a laptop any more it's a Tandy Model 102, and I just use it for editing text. Now that thing is portable... 20 hours on 4 AA batteries, passes the drop test, and has an excellent keyboard. I transfer files to/from via the serial port.
We're working on a memory/flash storage expansion for it at http://bitchin100.com/remem_project.html
-- John.
Re:You must be smoking a viable alternative to cra (Score:2)
'Nuff said
Re:You must be smoking a viable alternative to cra (Score:2)
Look for an older, larger laptop with option bays that'll accept batteries. Consider that the machine load-shares between them, so the demand from each individual battery is lower, which makes them more efficient. (Two batteries, each of which runs
Re:You must be smoking a viable alternative to cra (Score:2)
Several models can take 2GB of RAM, and can be had with 2MB cache and a 2GHz clock rate. Being P6-based means that it has a good instructions per cycle (IPC) unlike Pentium 4 chips. You can get efficient laptop hard drives that still run at 7200 RPM.
Re:You must be smoking a viable alternative to cra (Score:2)
But, I still have to find a laptop that won't fry my nuts when used as the name implies...
Re:You must be smoking a viable alternative to cra (Score:2)
How do you configure X to work with any random monitor? I've been trying to do something similar.
I'll need more space (Score:2, Funny)
Been there, done that, give you the tee shirt? (Score:5, Informative)
USB 2 case (with keyboard power cable for those PC's with lame USB ports) $32 - Bascon Computers
Knoppix $0 - the web
Portability Priceless
Fits in your pocket, you can carry your system all the time. Most places are starting to care about USB drives so check before you plug in.
The nice thing is you always have your code, your custom toolchain, music, etc. Like you never left home.
(OK, so you have to set up Knoppix and that will take an hour or two, far less than it takes you to build that XP box from scratch) - ob Windows vs. Linux dig
Laptop Alternative? (Score:2)
This just replaces a smaller flash drive... More storage...
Gentoo should do this too.. (Score:5, Funny)
-Note: this is a joke.
Re:Gentoo should do this too.. (Score:2)
Still, you only have to do it once.
What this thing needs (Score:5, Insightful)
This is cool. Naysayers be damnned! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I find it very inexpensive and convenient. Yes, I could probably do this myself, but I happen to like Mandrake's distribution and this gives me the chance to support my favorite distribution in an all-in-one package that is easy to use.
If you think you can do it reliably and more cheaply than Mandrake, please by all means give them some competition.
But I, for one, love Mandrake. It is the fastest distribution of the latest round I tried (Suse 9.1, Fedora 2, Slackware 10) and it is very stable. I also happen to like Suse 9.1 quite a bit for certain uses, but overall lean much more strongly towards Mandrake, but I digress.
I love this idea. You will be able to take your desktop with you everywhere without needing to use Knoppix. Knoppix is very nice, but this gives you another way to reach portability and will be faster since it runs off a HD, rather than off the CD. You can take music, documents with you and have your fully personalized desktop available anywhere where a computer is available.
This is more convenient than a laptop in some regards as it doesn't need to be recharged and is less conspicuous and thus less likely to be stolen.
And I don't know about you, but I can find a computer I can plug into just about anywhere, whether it's at a friend's or a relative's house, the library...
I think Mandrake is working very hard and they are making incredible progress. I have tested their 10.1 Beta 2 and it is already very, very good, although I would caution new users to wait for the *Official* release, not community, and definitely not RCs.
Re:This is cool. Naysayers be damnned! (Score:2)
almost 16 years ago (Score:2)
This is a little old for mac users
Is it quiet? Does it have a fan? (Score:2)
I can't tell from the website whether it has a fan. If it has a fan it is probably too noisy. Can someone with any LaCie 2.5" external drive tell me whether their's is quiet?
That's great that it gets its power from the USB port. Having to carry around an AC/DC adapter would significantly reduce the portability.
Re:Is it quiet? Does it have a fan? (Score:2)
My new Maxtor(5400rpm) offer no such luxury (although it also is fanless and pretty quiet).
You may consider me a noise freak by the way. I have a fanless C3 733mhz with a fanless 60watt psu as my main computer.
But you have to reboot a working machine! (Score:2)
Even if someone isn't present that day, there's usually something going on that shouldn't be dis
Re:But you have to reboot a working machine! (Score:2)
Something Linux can do that Windows XP can't. (Score:2)
What's great is that this is a device whose time has come. It's imminent ubiquity seems inevitable, giving Linux a very big leg up on Windows.
Re:am i the only one.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Imagine... (Score:4, Funny)
Why don't you imagine a beowulf cluster of slashdot moderators modding you down instead...
Oh no! They're coming after me!!
Re:Imagine... (Score:2)
It was OSX, using the included software RAID tools. Windows XP should be able to do it, but refused to do it with floppies; I don't know if it would handle USB hard drives. Linux would have no problem. Remember the whole point of software RAID is that it's all done in software; being x86 or not has absolutely no relevance. It just depends on whether your O
Re:I hope there are no corners on the drive ... (Score:2)
Re:I hope there are no corners on the drive ... (Score:2)
Re:I hope there are no corners on the drive ... (Score:2)
Re:Just not practical. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just not practical. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually it's more convenient, because most machines are able to boot off a CD by default, so you don't have to mess with the BIOS. Furthermore, it's a mini-CD, so it's not like it takes up a lot of extra room.
Re:Just not practical. (Score:2)
So I'll just take my mini-CD and... wha? A slot-loading CD drive?!? D'oh!!
</homer>
Re:Just not practical. (Score:2)
I live in a weird strange world where most machines don't boot from CD by default. It is far more convienent to just put the CD in and boot the machine than it is to try to find the correct BIOS settings (or find out that the machine in question doesn't have them).
Like I said before, it's a mini-CD, not an 8" floppy. It fits in a shirt pocket. It's not any mo
Re:Cheaper (Score:2)
Re:Maybe I'm underthinking this.. (Score:2)
One advantage that I see here is that you could change your Linux configuration and have your changes with you on every desktop you use. If they release a new version of OpenOffice (or Mozilla or GIMP...) I would believe you could update your packages...
Re:use an iPod instead. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:use an iPod instead. (Score:2)
I don't see why not. Macs can do it, booting from FireWire. I'd expect any PC that can boot from USB or FireWire should be able to boot from an iPod with no trouble. As someone else pointed out, the included bootable CD that makes it work on PCs that can't boot directly from USB is really the key, and of course it shouldn't be hard to make one of those.