Smoothwall Firewall project

Wednesday 28 October 2009

The exceptional power of an Ubuntu 9.10 live CD

I have been looking at some strange hardware lately, and one piece of hardware that turned up on my desk was a panel PC, with cables hanging out of the back of it. Many people had tried to install various types of OSes onto the thing with no success, that was until I turned up with an Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 CD.

We got to a X screen within 10 seconds, while one guy was still explaining to a small group of people that getting X to work on this device would be next to impossible. Needless to say he has kept his mouth shut for over a week now, basically to stop us all wetting ourselves again.

It has many new components including a new Intel graphics chipset, and Ubuntu detected and installed a driver for them all and worked perfectly. It allowed us to test the unit for a specific task that we had, which was all that wa required at this stage.

I'm sure with the correct drivers other OSes could be made to work this unit, but why would you bother when it just works with Ubuntu.

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