Ubermix on a flash drive?

[jamdis]

I just found out about Ubermix, and I'm pretty excited about it.  It seems to address a lot of the problems that keep computers from having a big impact on schools.

In my school, we are nowhere near a 1:1 environment.  However, I think that my students would benefit a lot from having their own persistent computing environment where they can save files and monkey with settings without worrying about sharing this space with other students.

For a long time, I've been eying the Sugar on a Stick project as a solution to this.  It puts the Sugar environment from the One Laptop Per Child project on a bootable USB the kid can carry with them from computer to computer.

My questions:

What would be involved with making Ubermix work this way? (doing an install of UM to a flash drive rather than an internal hard disk is easy enough but what other steps could we take to optimize this?)


USB sticks are pretty unreliable.   Is it it possible to set up a reliable, easy and quick backup / recovery scheme?   Ideally, this would be a system that kids and teachers could operate easily and quickly.

Thoughts>

[jnetman1]

Running ubermix from a flash drive or SD card wouldn't be too difficult, but performance wouldn't likely be great and, as you have suggested, reliability would be a concern. It would probably be fine if the students used Dropbox, UbuntuOne or Google Drive for storage of their files - probably better with Dropbox or UbuntuOne since they wouldn't have to think about it - but you might run into bandwidth issues since you'd be punching everything up to online storage.

[jamdis]

It would probably be fine if the students used Dropbox, UbuntuOne or Google Drive for storage of their files

I'm not huge on using cloud backup for young students as they are rarely compliant with COPPA laws for use by the under 13 set.  I was imagining something a bit more homegrown like setting up a NAS on the school network and finding some type of simple backup to use with that, but that isn't my area of expertise.

[jnetman1]

Gotcha. You could use DejaDup for that sort of auto-backup. See http://www.howtogeek.com/108869/how-to-back-up-ubuntu-the-easy-way-with-dj-dup/ for a how-to.

[jamdis]

Gotcha. You could use DejaDup for that sort of auto-backup. See http://www.howtogeek.com/108869/how-to-back-up-ubuntu-the-easy-way-with-dj-dup/ for a how-to.

Deja Dup looks pretty close to what I'm looking for.  I would still need to solve a few problems:

-Creating scripts for Ubermix so that backup is set up properly for the student
-Figuring out the best server to use for this type of backup
-Figuring out a scheme to keep each student's backup separate and organized

Any thoughts about tackling these problems?