For several years we’ve seen many Linux guys post about bootable USB flash drives into portable operating systems like Ubuntu or simplified versions of the OS for children, like Strawberry from SugarLabs
via donated USB flash drives.
In the spirit of ultra portable operating systems – over the weekend – we learned of Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry is not only an operating system from a flash drive, but it includes the processor too! This means the Linux OS is not high jacking the hardware of the host computer, but rather using it’s own processing power to boot into Linux.
The developer, David Braben, are shooting for a target price of the Raspberry USB computer to be around $25. The above prototype isn’t pretty, but hey – what prototype is? David and his team started this project in the effort to bring ultra low cost computers to less fortunate kids who need and want computer access.
A long long time ago, the One Laptop per Child was a program to get $100 computers into the hands of kids who’d otherwise never get a computer.
To give you an idea of what this mini USB computer can do, here are the specifications of the prototype:
700MHz ARM11
128MB of SDRAM
OpenGL ES 2.0
1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
Composite and HDMI video output
USB 2.0
SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
General-purpose I/O
Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)
If you are looking for video to spoon feed you this information, check out the video after the jump:
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Sugar Labs Nonprofit Announces v2 of Sugar on a Stick with Improved E-Book Readers, Recycles Any USB Stick Into Learning Environment for Children; Partners with Nexcopy, Inc.
PARIS, December 8, 2009 — Netbook World Summit — Sugar Labs(R), volunteer-driven nonprofit provider of the Sugar Learning Platform for over one-million children around the world, announces the release of Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry. Available for download at https://www.sugarlabs.org, Sugar on a Stick can be loaded onto any ordinary 1Gb or greater flash drive to reboot any PC, netbook or recent Mac directly into the child-friendly Sugar environment without touching the existing installation. Sugar is also available for GNU/Linux distributions, runs under virtualization on Windows and Apple OS X, and features built-in classroom collaboration and automatic backup to a Journal. The latest version of Sugar offers simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined updating of Activities for children, easier keyboard configuration, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash content, and more. New Activities such as Physics and OOo4Kids join updated favorites such as Browse and Read, suitable for reading e-books.
“Sugar on a Stick is a great way to experience Sugarâ€, commented Walter Bender, Sugar Labs executive director. “In this holiday season, we wish to remind parents and teachers that e-books are not only for costly reader units for the well-to-do, but freely available as part of the open-access to knowledge movement to help children everywhere develop critical learning skills and to bridge the digital divide wherever it exists.â€
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If you are like me [and most people] you have a favorite flash drive. It’s not necessarily because of the way it looks, but rather – over time – all of your important information has accumulated to one stick. You get to a point where if you are going to save any kind of data to your USB drive, then you might as well save it to the one which has everything else.
This is where RecycleUSB.com comes in…if you have extra sticks lying around, which aren’t gett’in the love – donate them. Recycle USB has partnered with SugarLabs to turn donated USB sticks into portable learning computers.
What do I mean by portable learning computers?
Well SugarLabs created a Linux distro [based off Fedora] which boots directly from a flash drive. The distro is a customized learning platform for kids to
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In the spirit of ultra portable operating systems – over the weekend – we learned of Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry is not only an operating system from a flash drive, but it includes the processor too! This means the Linux OS is not high jacking the hardware of the host computer, but rather using it’s own processing power to boot into Linux.
The developer, David Braben, are shooting for a target price of the Raspberry USB computer to be around $25. The above prototype isn’t pretty, but hey – what prototype is? David and his team started this project in the effort to bring ultra low cost computers to less fortunate kids who need and want computer access.
A long long time ago, the One Laptop per Child was a program to get $100 computers into the hands of kids who’d otherwise never get a computer.
To give you an idea of what this mini USB computer can do, here are the specifications of the prototype:
