Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category
JoliCloud Review
Probably about a year ago was when I first heard of JoliCloud. At that time it was this mysterious thing, an operating system for netbooks that was supposedly leaps and bounds better than what was currently available to run on netbooks. This sounded really interesting to me so I entered my email on their site to get an invite when they released it. Jump to a couple months ago and I get an email to download the alpha version of JoliCloud. Excited, I hurriedly downloaded it and installed in on my Eee pc. Here’s some of my thoughts on it.
I popped it in and started it up and was greeted to a startup screen and boot screen that looked a lot like Ubuntu’s.
I walked through the installer all the while thinking it looked like Ubuntu. I let the installer finish and the system reboot and I’m greeted with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface.
And thats exactly what it is, Ubuntu Netbook Remix. The JoliCloud part is an application that is launched when you click that cloud icon. This is where the invitation part comes in as you login to JoliCloud here.
After you login you end up on the dashboard that basically shows what system updates there are and maybe some notification things.
The other tabs are the App Directory (which I’ll come back to) and the Settings tab. JoliCloud is like a social network that allows you to follow people kinda like Twitter.
The App Directory is the main thing of JoliCloud. From it you can install any application with one click. As you can see in the picture above of the App Directory there are normal applications like Skype and VLC, then there are webapps like Gmail and Facebook. You can install any of these apps with a click of a button.
After you’ve got something installed you go back to the Ubuntu NBR interface (by clicking the home icon in the upper left) to launch it. For the webapps they open in a full screen window.
So I was curious how it was doing this, mainly the JoliCloud app and running the webapps. So I went hunting around the system and found that all its basically doing is using Mozilla Prism. Prism is a browser like Firefox, but it places an icon on your desktop and ties that site to a single browser window. This makes it seem like the webapp is a normal desktop app. As far as the JoliCloud program, it’s just another site running in Prism that hooks into Ubuntu’s apt system to install programs.
So there you have it, it’s Ubuntu NBR using Mozilla Prism. Not as revolutionary as you would hope. Sure its optimized some for netbooks, but so is something like Eeebuntu. I don’t care much for Ubuntu NBR, mainly Maximus, the thing that runs every program as maximized, and the way it shows items on the taskbar. I think it also comes down to the fact that I can install programs from the command line just as easy as clicking an icon. And if I want to run a webapp in a single window I can just install Prism and set it up myself. When it comes to my netbook usage, I’m usually pretty minimal. Firefox and a terminal are the apps I use most. With the ocassional pdf or movie viewing. So for now I’ll keep looking for a setup I like on my netbook. I’m really hopeful for KDE’s plasma netbook shell that they are developing.
-Dexter-