Geeks unite !

Camfed is installing two different models of Aleutia computers – the T1 and the E2. The E2 computer is the older model and the T1 the newer. The E2, though it uses about 3 less watts of power than the T1, has no internal disk drive and uses an 8 GB removable flash card as its only source of storage. It is also smaller than the already impressively small T1. On one hand the flash card is nice as it can be removed and easily replaced with a new flash card in case the first one stops working. On the other hand, it is much less flexible than the T1 which has the internal drive and still the option to boot on an external USB memory stick.

That is one of the wonderful and impressive things about Ubuntu – you can boot off of a memory stick. Even a Windows or Mac system which has never seen Ubuntu before can boot off of the memory stick. When you do boot, you are then presented with a list of options, including the possibility of installing Ubuntu on the system on which you just booted up. Impressive stuff! And the OS GUI (operating system graphical user interface – essentially the “Windows” we are used to working on) is so simple to use.

If you have worked with a Mac or a Windows system it will take only minutes to familiarize yourself with using Ubuntu’s menus and applications. Using the command line is something altogether different. It is Linux so it uses mostly UNIX commands. I grew up on DOS (Windows) command lines but became familiar with UNIX command lines while I worked on UNIX middleware at Philip Morris and worked for 2 years on ZENIX (a different “flavor” of UNIX released by SCO - Santa Cruz Operations). So Linux is not completely foreign to me, thankfully, because I have needed to use the Linux command lines a more than few times for support out in the filed on this project.