Review: RACHEL5 (CMAL150) - what I got, and what I did with it
I bought a RACHEL5 in May 2026 for a rural vocational school in southern Malawi. When it arrived I was so surprised by how out of date everything on it was (both the operating system and the apps) that my first assumption was that I’d been shipped a device that hadn’t been re-imaged properly, still carrying an old test build by mistake. It wasn’t a mistake. That’s what the current product is. I can’t in good conscience hand this device to a school as it ships, and after some back-and-forth with myself I wiped it and built something else on the hardware. Sharing this in case it helps other prospective buyers.
The hardware itself is fine. A solid little box, two Wi-Fi radios, two wired ports, plenty of storage.
The software is the problem.
- The base operating system is Ubuntu 16.04, which has been end-of-life for over five years. No security updates. Not something I’d feel comfortable putting on a school network and leaving there for years.
- The RACHEL documentation warns against updating, citing a Wi-Fi bug as the reason. That bug was fixed in the mainline Linux driver back in 2017. On a current Ubuntu install the Wi-Fi cards, including access-point mode on both bands, come up with no extra drivers, no vendor firmware fiddling, nothing. The warning has been obsolete for the better part of a decade.
- The web interface is an ageing pile of PHP and shell scripts that is hard to audit and clearly not being actively maintained.
- Most of the content isn’t RACHEL’s own work in the first place. The valuable pieces (Wikipedia, medical references, Wiktionary, courses, and so on) come from Kiwix and Kolibri, both of which are healthy, actively maintained projects. The problem is that the copies bundled with RACHEL lag behind. The Wikipedia snapshot on the device when I bought it in May 2026 was from 2023, even though Kiwix had been publishing fresh dumps every few months since then. If you care about your students having current information, you’re better off going straight to Kiwix and Kolibri for the content, on a schedule you control.
- Several of the bundled apps are zombies i.e. projects that were replaced upstream years ago and are still sitting on the RACHEL image. KA-Lite is the clearest example: its own developers moved on to Kolibri long ago, but it’s still there.
What I did instead. I put a current Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS on it using a lightly modified autoinstaller (the box is headless, so the install had to run without prompts, but nothing exotic). Wi-Fi worked immediately, on both bands, with stock software. On top of that I installed current versions of Kiwix and Kolibri directly from those projects, loaded a fresh set of ZIMs and courses (including a current Wikipedia), and put a small landing page in front of it; one screen, big buttons, organised by topic (farming, beekeeping, solar, carpentry, welding, and so on for this particular school). Self-study only: no accounts, no teacher mode, no homework submission. Simpler for students, and nothing for the school to administer.
It’s been running at the school for a few months and has been well received.
Suggestion to World Possible. The hardware deserves a modern base. A supported Ubuntu LTS, a much smaller and more auditable frontend, and most importantly, leaning on the upstream Kiwix and Kolibri projects for content rather than shipping snapshots that fall years behind, would make this a device I could genuinely recommend. As it stands, a buyer who cares about maintainability is better off treating the CMAL150 as bare hardware and installing current software on it themselves.