jolicloudThere are many people who think that running Winodows XP on your low powered netbook is clunky and Linux is also a painful thing to work with. Good news for them. The Jolicloud OS is specifically designed for those miniaturized laptops with underpowered CPUs and low RAM. Crafted by Tarik Krim, the founder and former CEO of Netvibes, Jolicloud is basically a modified flavor of Linux which seems to rely heavily on large icon-based navigation. Here is a brief description and some screenshots of the alpha version of the JoliCloud OS.

Installation

After downloading the IMG file from Jolicloud Website it needs to be burned to a USB key. The computer is then needed to be configured to be booted from that key to install Jolicloud in the system. But the process is not as easy as described. As Robin Wauters describes in TechCrunch :

the process of installing it on my Windows XP-powered netbook was frankly a pain in the butt

But you should bear the pain with a smiling face considering the fact that the OS is only a alpha release.

Design

The design of the OS is optimized for use on smaller screens. The visual design is quite intuitive and it is easy to figure out how to do things even if you are running it for the first time. The structure reminds us of the iPhone OS which is incredibly easy to get used to.

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Technology

Jolicloud is built upon Debian and Ubuntu 9.04 and tweaked for computers that have low memory and smaller screens and hence not suitable for standard laptops. The applications run on Linux builds or Mozilla Prism. To run Windows based products you can use Wine which is an emulator that runs those applications in a virtual desktop.

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Conclusion

Netbooks are very different from the normal laptops and desktops in their hardware configurations. So, they should also have OS specifically optimized for their operating system. Jolicloud is a huge step forward from Windows XP in terms of speed and usability.
The design of Jolicloud is intuitive, the structure is simple and spot on, the processes are straightforward - which gives a good overall impression - especially for an alpha release.
Perhaps you can see Jolicloud being loaded in to the netbooks coming later this year. Can Google Android become a good competitor to Jolicloud in coming years? What do you think?

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