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help: portable, internet capable devices

Started by Jim Reverend · 1 year ago

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14 comments

  • farrisgoldstein

    1 year ago

    Wait, your dayjob is locking down (and presumably encrypting) your laptop, but not issuing you something newer than that old Dell you have?

    If you were getting a new one, with built-in wireless and whatnot, I'd say go with linux-on-a-flash-drive in a heartbeat. Even a decently well stocked Ubuntu install can come in under 2GB, and flash sticks are coming down on $/G all the time. Even WITH the old laptop, I'd probably go that route, since Feisty hasn't had any trouble with any cardbus 802.11 card I've thrown at it so far.
    reply
  • Jim Reverend

    1 year ago

    You got it. They are locking down and encrypting the old Dell.

    I'm thinking that this is certainly a good cheap, option. The problem
    is that, despite the fact that it'll look like a "real laptop", it
    will not have the storage space of a real laptop since I don't think
    I'll be able to get Linux to read or write to the internal drive once
    it is encrypted. Throwing ~$100 at this problem doesn't solve it very
    elegantly. It's still a regular sized laptop, but it has the reduced
    features and capacity of a smaller laptop, but not the portability or
    convenience of a true mobile-internet-device.

    Then again, beefing up the N800 to these same capabilities will cost
    ~$150 (SD Cards, bluetooth keyboard) and I'll still have to buy the
    $230 device (i.e. $380, total). So the cost difference is quite
    substantial which makes it seem more worthwhile, despite the fact that
    it isn't exactly clean.

    Can you recommend an Ultra Portable linux distribution that's
    customizable like Ubuntu but considers reduced size as one of its top
    priorities?

    On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 6:08 PM, Disqus
    reply
  • farrisgoldstein

    1 year ago

    Xubuntu. You'll love it.

    Otherwise, if you really want to go as tiny as possible, go with DSL (Damn Small Linux), but it's not nearly as cool as Xubuntu.
    reply
  • Martin Atkins

    1 year ago

    I've been considering an EeePC, but ASUS has said that a newer model with a higher-resolution screen is on the horizon, so I've been holding out for that. Hopefully they'll add bluetooth as well; it seems like a bit of an omission for a portable computer.
    reply
  • Jim Reverend

    1 year ago

    Certainly! I mean, with all the stuff they packed into that little
    device, what more is a bluetooth radio. I'd rather have it than a
    wired ethernet port, myself.

    Of course the new version will probably have a much high price point
    as well -- at least at first. Which puts it into a different class all
    together.

    On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 7:00 PM, Disqus
    reply
  • lys1123

    1 year ago

    "Additionally, a full-blown portable hard-drive is not an option because it takes up both of my USB ports and is far more wires than I'd care to deal with."

    Actually that isn't true anymore. We do almost all of our work on VMs at my dayjob and we have several external HD's that we use for this and they all use just a single USB cable.
    reply
  • Jim Reverend

    1 year ago

    Right. But. How do you power them?
    reply
  • lys1123

    1 year ago

    They get power from the USB port. Just one cable, really. I can show you if you come over sometime.
    reply
  • Jim Reverend

    1 year ago

    I've seen some bus powered drives. They're just usually slow, small, expensive or all three. I'd love to see otherwise.
    reply
  • lys1123

    1 year ago

    What you need to look for is an External HD no larger than 2.5". Basically a Notebook HD, that uses less energy so can be powered by a single USB. At work we use 2.5" 40GB 5400 rpm drives, but we have a lot of them and swap them often. Basically we have different VM's for each client configuration and we change VM's several times a day to deal with issues from different clients.

    Since you are just getting one you would probably want something bigger than 40GB. Something like this maybe:
    http://www.buy.com/articles/loc/63266/channelty...
    reply
  • Jim Reverend

    1 year ago

    Awesome. Price is a bit high, but possibly worth it. Gotta find out if my laptop is USB 2.0 or not.

    Thank you! I looked for these bus powered drives not too long ago and couldn't find anything I'd be willing to buy. This is much closer.
    reply
  • Jim Reverend

    1 year ago

    Whoa. Wait. This is 200gb for $140. That's perfect!
    reply
  • Alex

    1 year ago

    If all you want to do is browse the internet, you might want to look into picking up a used fat model PSP. It won't load flash players or some of the larger pages, but if you just want to do some browsing, it would work great.
    reply
  • Jim Reverend

    1 year ago

    I hadn't considered that, but it's certainly an idea worth looking
    into. Thank you!!

    On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 7:43 PM, Disqus
    reply

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