[Mesh] Lot of rugged/GPS-enabled laptops available

[Pete Forsyth]

All--

I ran across something interesting on eBay, a lot of 4 rugged GoBook III
Ix260 laptops. These are Pentium M laptops (i.e. old and slow) but they are
rugged, they have built-in GPS capabilities, touch screens, and bright
outdoor-viewing displays. They come without hard drives, but with caddies.

I wonder if these might be useful for warbiking / node mapping, or other
mesh/sudo activities? I am interested to fool around with them, and
wouldn't mind owning one, but am hesitant to buy all 4 unless there is
likely to be a use for them (and unless I could recover some of the cost).

A little googling indicates that Ubuntu seems to run fine on them (I am
running Lubuntu on a similarly-specced Dell, and am super happy with it).
There might be an issue getting the touch screen to work -- I saw a
question about that without any response.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-4-Itronix-Go-Book-III-Rugged-Laptop-IX260-1-8GHz-1GB-WORKS-100-NOW-BIOS-/291047611667?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item43c3ca1d13

Thoughts?
Pete
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