Hardware puzzle pieces

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity. --Douglas Horton

Getting all the parts is one one thing... Getting them to all work together is where it gets interesting.  As I start putting the puzzle pieces together and getting ready for a dry run setup, I wanted to show you the parts that will help all this run...  The puzzle pieces...

A couple of days ago I posted the generic OM2P pics.  Here are the actual ones I am taking with me!

There you go...  The heart of the network sitting on my desk.  I setup the cloudtrax account (another piece of the puzzle) to run these a few days ago and have not yet had the chance to enter all the MACs.  I am going to do all that tonight.

Here are some more puzzle pieces...

I have some ThinkPenguin Wireless G USB Adapters (sure to work out of the box on Linux), some SanDisk 4G USB keys and finally some Lexar 8G USB keys ($10 for 8G USB Flash Drives at Futureshop) I am not a big fan of Lexar USB flash drives because of past experience, but the deal was good and I have the smaller SanDisk ones to fall back on should these not do the trick.
 

On a side note, I like what Think Penguin is doing with their "Hardware that just works" and Linux devices.  I hope more people pick up on the fact there is a market for this.   Lazy people who don't feel like doing the research into whats on sale that is going to work, just hop on over there and buy what you need.  That's what I did and it was delivered right when they said they would.  All in all I am really happy with them so far.  I have yet to try the keys though.  That will be the real test.

The USB flash drives  are for the live kiosk distro (that I said I would write about and have not done yet...).  As time permits tonight and through tomorrow, I am going to be installing Jacob Steelsmith's Ubuntu kiosk based on 10.04.1 iso on these keys.  I have a bunch of hardware I am going to test them on.

<gulp> The idea is I will simply pop in two USB devices, one USB flash drive to boot off of and one USB wireless adapter and I "should" have an Internet Kiosk! </gulp>


I reached out to Jacob and he did tell me that all the 10.04 drivers are on there so I should not have any issues when it comes to compatibility...  If it worked with 10.04 (which is what most of my stuff was running for a while) then it should work.  The big question will be will it work on the hardware in Zambia?!?  I have no way to find that out until I get there so I will keep preparing as much as I can here.