A friend of mine knew I was a looking for a different OS for my MSI Windand and a few weeks ago sent me to gOS. Which stands for Good Operating System. gOS is truly Linux/Ubuntu with a bit of a face-life. It actually looks a whole lot more like my Mac desktop. A great feature is that it already has a few of my favorite Cloud Apps already burnt in to the dock at the bottom. It has:
- -Firefox
-Google Apps (Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentation)
-gMail
-Google Calendar
and a few more.
It also has Open Office for the Open Source fans of the world. This is pretty sweet though. All I have to do is click on the icon in my dock and my Cloud App launches. Just to sweeten the deal a bit more you are also able to add other Cloud Apps to the dock that are not already there. The basic process is simple and takes about a minute. So, in about 10 minutes you can populate your dock with all of your Cloud Apps.
I see this as a definite option as a FREE OS to use in a school for a few reasons and I will not count FREE as one of them.
- If your school is aleady living in a Mac environment the transition may be easier then you think. For anyone, comfortability and familiarity is key when making any kind change. If I can offer my teachers and students an OS that appears to be very similar to what they are working in already they are more likley to accept.
- Having the ability easily add the Cloud Apps that I am using to a central location (dock) and not have to access them through my web browser bookmarks or one of the many social bookmarking tools is easy. Let's face it, if it isn't easy not many will do it. If it is just something else that they have to learn and potentially fumble through they are not going to do it with an open mind. gOS is making it easy.
However, the one thing about gOS that has not been easy is installing it on my MSI Wind Netbook
Please check out Cloud as well, it looks great!
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19 Comments
Jon - I am glad you are liking gOS. It is an awesome operating system and I think it is pretty cool that you can add URLs to the dock - I didn't realize that.
I think your reasons are good. I wonder how hard it would be to create a custom image of gOS with a customized bar (or a quick script that would fix it). If you could do that, it would make district-wide installs faster.
I enjoy following your blog - keep up the good work. You are becoming the netbook / cloud-app expert that I love to turn to for answers.
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Boy, was this good info! Being at a Mac school, I'm trying to figure out a way to make a transition to netbooks as painless as possible. It's amazing how much a familiar appearance matters to the person using the machine.
That being said, the eeePC that I'm experimenting with also is w/out an optical drive. Wondering if the process for booting from a flash drive would be similar. Currently, we're using Easy Peasy because it allows for multiple users.
I'll pass this along to my tech. Looks like it might be fun to check out!
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I really like the look of this OS. I could only manage to get it to run off of the cd. It would not do anything when I clicked install, any ideas? I tried downloading a different ISO, but it would not even get past the boot screen. It could be my CPU, it is an old IBM thinkpad t20, pIII 700 mhz.
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Is there anyway to get free operating system for a bare boned computer? Would I be able to take things like an operating system and microsoft office from another computer? How exactly do I do this?
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As more and more companies move towards cloud computing and web based apps, does anybody else think it will eliminate many IT jobs, hardware and software companies? If everything is running in large data centers, won't this be where most jobs will be based?
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Well if you are going to use the pc as a dedicated server and not as a pc then there is no point in using a standard oporating system, however if you will use that pc for other things other than a dedicated server then you would need a normal OS.
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Me and my friends are starting a band from scratch. We are building a computer from scratch and using a Linux Operating system to power it, but which distribution is the best for audio and video recording for a band?
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I know the apps are saved in the cloud and downloaded for each use. but any information which is entered in these apps is that saved on the personal computer or is that sent into the cloud as well.
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I hate MAC OS. I just don't think they run very good for how expensive the machines they come on are.
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I've recently gotten an ipod touch 8 gigabyte. I haven't filled it up yet, but to be safe, I installed an app called dropbox which gives 2 gigabytes of free cloud storage. It said on a website that some apps can give you from 1 -10 gigs of free storage. Does anyone have any apps that gives more than 2 gigs of free storage?
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The desktop has a look that is similar to Windows, almost like a cross between XP and Vista. All things considered I would say it has a decent look. It has a familiar looking desktop that has a sidebar with widgets as well as a start menu. As for applications.
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Here's an excellent, free program that creates a virtual optical drive that you can use to run an ISO file as if it's a real CD/DVD.
http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html
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As more and more companies move towards cloud computing and web based apps, does anybody else think it will eliminate many IT jobs, hardware and software companies? If everything is running in large data centers, won't this be where most jobs will be based?
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Session References Downloads Windows Azure SDK Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio Azure Services Training Kit Home Pages Microsoft.com/azure Cloud Computing Tools Videos and Screencasts.
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If it is saved on the personal computer could they only access the Information when the application was downloaded again??
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I know the apps are preserved inside cloud and downloaded for every single use. but any data which is entered in these apps is always that saved about the personal personal computer or is that sent in to the cloud too.
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As a lot more and far more firms move towards cloud computing and web based apps, does anybody else think it'll remove quite a few IT work, hardware and software program businesses? If every thing is running in huge info centers, will not this be where by most work opportunities will probably be structured?
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I am in the market for a new smart phone. My options are the BlackBerry Pearl, Palm Centro and the Motorola MOTO Q. The MOTO Q is much cheaper in price. Anyone know the difference between the 3 in terms of Operating System and ability to access online documents, etc? Most of my productivity is done on the cloud through Web 2.0 apps.
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We use XERO quite happily with regards to Accounting software, etc! Other SaaS apps we use: Tomsplanner.com, notableapp.com, Pivotaltracker.com, freshbooks.com, amongst others.
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