We have observed that in past few months every other technology blog having a post on cloud computing and cloud OS. Cloud Os is also called future of OS by many blogs designed for accessing internet and web application primarily and compatible with any netbook.

It was Google who first came in public about its cloud based OS, Chrome OS which is much awaited Cloud OS, yet to be released (god knows when). Its not just google coming up with this futuristic idea on cloud OS there are many other companies in Q and already in market.

Some months back on techgearz we saw an article on gOS and cloud OS built on Ubuntu 9. Jolicloud is another such cloud OS release 2 weeks back again built on Ubuntu.

Idea of Jolicloud started in summer 2008 when Tariq Krim started thinking about the possibility to build an “organic” laptop, a combination of the greenest technologies and a fair trade production. This device would run an Internet operating system and replace existing costly software with their web alternatives.

He meet few manufacturers, designers and industry friends regarding the same, later he decided to drop the hardware to focus only on building the Internet OS. He was later joined by Romain Huet and Tristan Groléat, two young developers who shared his vision. They spent a few days drafting the blueprint of what an Internet OS should be. They decided to buy a few netbooks, refresh their knowledge of Linux and rented some office space in the Montorgueil area of Paris.

Jolicloud is a lightweight Ubuntu based cloud OS designed with netbooks and internet it mind, according to @jolisupport (Joulicloud’s online support team on twitter) joulicloud support almost 98% of netbooks available in market and it has the latest Linux kernel. Its not just limited to netbooks, you can install it on PC too with minimum configuration of Pentium processor with 300 Mhz and 32 MB Ram – 256 MB recommended.

( Normally, netbooks comes with AMR based / Atom processors and 1 GB Ram ).

At a Quick glance, desktop of this OS reminds me of a simple portal website with all necessary links to your favorite web sites and applications, just a click and get started. Unlike other Linux based OS its not too bulky and loaded with many desktop apps, its just a 602MB ISO file (click here to download), ported with basic applications like Firefox, Ping IM etc and other Linux basic apps for administration purpose.

It also has a Internet tab where you can find many internet based applications like facebook prism, shortcut to Firefox, bittorent client and any internet based software which you installed (check the above image, i have installed Linux based chrome & Twitter Prism and it started appearing in Internet tab on desktop). Unlike many Linux versions, Jolicloud doesn’t contain a Open Office pre-installed, but can download it from “My Jolicloud – App Directory”. It contains quick reference to internet based office apps like Google Docs and Zoho document editor.

My Jolicloud is a web app to access joliclouds online community, you need to create an profile / account for accessing this space., this can be done once you install the OS. You can synchronize your My Jolicloud profile contents with your Facebook profile.

My Jolicloud also contains list of users who are using jolicloud, you can follow them and check their statuses like you do in twitter. This status basically contains which software they have installed recently, what update did they do to their profile and so on. I saw around a 300 registered users when I logged in, this may increase soon as many users start using it.

Another interesting part in My Jolicloud was something called App Directory, you will find many application like Open Office, Google Chrome, Skype etc and Firefox Prism of many web apps which includes, Gmail, YouTube, Zoho office, Twitter, Facebook to name a few.

( Firefox Prism allows you to have a quick reference to any web apps on your desktop, which you frequently access. )

Google’s Chorme OS claims to have a 7 second boot-up time, well jolicloud took me around 30-35 secs to boot completely and around 10 secs to shutdown. ( It might be b’coz i am using it on VMware Player and not a netbook, with a shared CPU was already running window vista)

Well apart from the above features, you can find easy to access system administrative tools, etc. It would be out of scope of this article to explain every details of this OS, so soon you can expect a video post on joulicloud.

You can join discussion on cloud with us @ Facebook and Twitter

Check out some screens shots from joulicloud  below  OR Click Here

If we look into the so called Google Chrome OS and Cloud OS from gOS, they are all  browser based or you can say a OS designed to access internet and date present in internet.

If we talk about data, your data like documents, presentation will go into Google docs or similar applications / YouTube, iMeem and other alike application for videos / audio and gmail, Facebook, IMs and other social networking sites to communicate with your friends. Or you can say your data will be floating in the internet and you need to go to each application for access them. In a way, we will loose the ease of  accessing data at one place i.e our desktop and we have to login to all these above mentioned applications.

Question coming to mind is, can we still collaborate all data at one place like we do on our windows / Mac desktop ??

Here we have one answer to that “Question?” that called web based OS … It not exactly an OS but, web based mimic of OS that we have today.

One of such web OS is eyeOS (there are many others also), eyeOS is a php based Web OS/ application (we will be referring it as OS here). Its completely Open Source solution and any one can download it under GNU-GPL license.

It can store all kind of data at one place and access from something called your online / web desktop, its also powered with some cool application again a mimic to original desktop versions.

Application>>

• eyeOs comes with web based office application which replaces your desktop version of MS office. It not as matured as them but useful for editing excel and document file.
• It also has a good file management capability
• Also have an inbuilt media player.
• You also have a in built IM chat and mail client, you can configure it your requirement.
• Also it has desktop management tools, you can change desktop themes like you do for your  window desktop.
• Last but not the least, Its an open source product ,  you could also develop application  using simple html, javascript ajax and php.
• [check out screen shots below to see few of them.]

What Good / Bad about it.

Good part of this OS its completely online you can save data and access it from anywhere whenever you want. Its open source, so you could download it and modify it to your requirement.

Bad part is you need to be online to access it.

But how do i access it ?

It is purely Cloud Computing example. Currently this eyeOS is hosted on eyeOS linux based server. You can access Demo version of eyeOS by registering for the same with eyeOS.com. Demo version comes with 1-gb of free disk space and those cool applications.

I am not sure how much it will cost if you want to expand the space. eyeOS also comes with an enterprive cloud based paid serive.

Or else you can download this OS under the GNU-GPL license and use it on your PHP server,

Note For  PHP developer, You don’t have to install MySQL or any other kind of database for this OS / application, it work on pure folder structure of system you are using to port this application. [ Download eyeOS ]

<< Screen Shots Eye OS >>

Web based desktop of eyeOS

Playing Linkin Park music on eyeOS flash based web -media player

Interface to upload files from desktop to web based eyeOS desktop

online document editor - online replacement to original office apps

Control Panel to manage users and themes.

File management interface, similar to linux file management interface.

Cloud OS, infact it is said to be the first browser based operating system to be launched from a company called gOS. It designed spealy for netbook PC and will be avaible in marcket by 2010 along with Gigabytes netbook.

This video shows how simple and fast this operating system is. It powered with some cool Google Apps like the other gOS versons. (Read this article for that).

its a browser based OS and the browser lookes like the Google’s Chrome browser and first Question in my mind is Google’s “Chrome OS” and gOS’s “Cloud OS” one and the same.

lol no idea … will have to wait and watch.

Video shows that the OS boot very fast also log off with the same speed. This is something a user will always look for but, its not a normal OS with lods of features, its designed only for internet users.

Cloud OS is already running a beta which you can get on demand from gOS website http://thinkgos.com. You will have to mail them on beta@thinkgos.com along with you netbook model number, if you have one.

Read this space for more interesting articles on this topic