gOS "Cloud" instant-on OS comes to Gigabyte touchscreen netbooks
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted December 1st 2008 1:38PM
posted December 1st 2008 1:38PM
Not that we were too impressed with gOS when we first saw Rocket almost a year ago, but Cloud -- the small footprint, quick boot Linux variant that Good OS introduced today at the Netbook World Summit in Paris -- looks like an altogether different beast. Arriving pre-installed alongside Windows on the new Gigabyte touchscreen netbooks (perhaps some variant of the M912V), the new SplashTop-esque OS uses a web browser as its main interface, with an integrated dock providing such Web 2.0 mainstays as Skype, YouTube and the Google family of apps -- and if this smattering of tools doesn't meet all of your computing needs, you can always boot into your main OS from there. Cloud can be installed as a dual-boot partition on your hard drive or SSD as well as onto a flash chip hardwired onto a motherboard. That's all we have for now, but you can bet we'll be on hand to check it out at CES in January.
Well, my notebook is old so the battery life is really poor. Will upgrade my notebook this Christmas. Its good to keep a 1 Gig partition and install this OS, so I can boot quickly when I just need the browser or Skype...
It's because his name has a ' in it. This is something Weblogs could fix in about an hour if they wanted to. Letting people use quotes as part of there screen name is stupid, and it just invites SQL injection attacks. Web 101 people. If you guys at Weblogs need some help in the technical department (and it looks like you do) I have some time next week.
I, on the other hand, think that encasing the word I in quotes would invalidate your opinion. But that's just "my" opinion. I prefer free-range pronouns.
Dammit, why didn't that attach to the low-ranker up there? Hate!
I spy chrome on Linux!
chromium
I think it's a mockup. Scroll down button is missing. Someone forgot to put it back when they cropped the bottom of the browser window and moved the border up. The caption buttons and text have been changed but this could be the result of small modifications to the source code (or more mocking up) to get a nice looking screenshot.
But I really don't think they've ported it to Linux yet. IIRC a lot of what Chrome does on Windows just doesn't work on Linux as well (one process drawing onto a window owned by another process and processing clicks etc from that window) and would need a bit of experimentation and hacking to make it work properly.
This could serve as a pretty nice GUI substitute for GRUB. The only downside is it wouldnt time out, so you would actually have to click in.
How configurable is that dock?
Add:
some form of multi-protocol IM client (is there one on the web, that will store logs and everything?),
a link for taking me straight to LJ,
a link for booting to Linux (though, I'd probably go with Ubuntu over gOS).
Remove: the (Orkut?) link, the Blogger link, and the Windows booter link.
I'd probably be on board with that. If the IM client option is good enough (native Pidgin might be cool, too), I might not need a "main OS" at all. Eliminate the internal hard drive, or use a small flash drive for storing minimal stuff (IM logs, for example). Or put a 3G card its place.
why cant we use it while the system boots up...there could be a little bar showing the status of the system booting built into the "boot windows" icon, and once youve been using it for a while windows would be fully loaded...you could click switch to windows/gOS, cloud would close and windows would be up and running?...