Posts tagged netbooks

The other day I got an email from the Jolicloud team stating that my account was ready to be upgraded to version 1.0 of their software. Relatively excited I hopped on my HP netbook and upgraded. It was a quick and easy process however what I was left with was certainly not something I’d have upgraded to if I had known what it was. Upon initial login you’re presented with a nice looking HTML5 driven menu or rather dashboard. Your applications are listed here. At the moment it only seems that “Jolicloud-apps” are listed here and getting to any native system applications requires a bit of extra work. I have yet to actually figure out how to do this without launching them from command line.

While I actually don’t really use many native applications, there is one that is very important to me so not being able to easily access it is definitely an issue. That application is Terminal. Fortunately you can access Nautilus and I ended up searching for the application. There is however a bit easier method to accessing it which is to simply hit Alt+F1. I did do a bit of searching and it looks like native applications aren’t quite integrated into their Dashboard yet, but they’re working on it. However I did notice Google Chrome made it onto my Dashboard somehow, but I couldn’t figure out how to add my own.

To be fair, Jolicloud is certainly a one of the best netbook operating systems. It installs very easily and it’s very simple to use. Heck, I’d even toss this on my parents netbook or laptop (if they didn’t already have a new MacBook). It allows easy access to popular websites and applications. You can easily install applications from Jolicloud’s large list. The social aspect is still there (how I have zero friends so it’s pretty useless to me). Jolicloud 1.0 now supports synching of applications across the computers you’ve attached to your profile, so I thought that was pretty cool.

Overall, the update is not for me. They seem to have simplified things a bit too much and took away some of the Linux. I do however think once they allow native Linux applications to be added into the Dashboard that bit of annoyance will disappear. I really like Jolicloud, but they could have made sure native applications work previous to releasing this update.