LinkNotes: Jolicloud The Free OS For Netbooks

2009-08-23

Jolicloud The Free OS For Netbooks

Hands-on with an alpha of the Jolicloud netbook distro

Jolicloud is a Linux-based netbook OS that is built on top of Canonical's Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It uses Mozilla's Prism environment to make Web applications accessible outside of the browser.

clipped from news.cnet.com

Preview of Jolicloud: The social Netbook OS

How it works

Jolicloud centers on a directory of applications that can be sorted by genre, release date, and popularity. To download or remove them from your computer, you just click on their icon and it does the rest. Jolicloud groups both Web apps and software programs under the same name umbrella, and both are added and removed from your system in the same manner. There's also a normal add and remove programs tool just like you get in Windows, but it's easier to do it from Jolicloud's rounded and simplistic interface.

To install or uninstall "applications" you can head to Jolicloud's online directory.

One of the big draws to Jolicloud is that it takes this list of apps you have installed and backs it up. If you have multiple computers running Jolicloud that share the same account, it syncs up those apps, including any log-ins or shared data. This puts less of an importance on what hardware you're using, meaning you can hop from machine to machine and get right back to what you were doing on the other.