Cloud OS crowd readies own-brand netbook
Jolicloud to offer... Jolibook
Jolicloud, the company that offers a cloud-centric Linux distro for netbooks, is getting into the hardware business.
It will begin selling the Jolibook later this month. Jolibook appears to be a standard netbook with a dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor, according to the little Jolicloud has said about the spec.
Which includes a 250GB hard drive, by the way - an oddly large storage capacity, you might think, for an machine that runs an OS "designed for people who live in the cloud".
The Jolibook will come pre-loaded with the as-yet-unreleased Jolicloud 1.1, itself derived from Ubuntu and designed to connect you to Skype, Facebook, Spotify and so on.
There's no word yet on how much the Jolibook will cost, but since the company notes that "computers are now becoming cheaper than mobile phones and MP3 players", we hope it'll be as cheap as chips.
Being open source, you can download Jolicloud 1.0 now, for free, to install or run off a live CD or USB drive. ®
COMMENTS
how do you know?
Given that the product isn't even available yet, how can you say that it's "many, many times better" than anything else?
Moblin ?
Any reason to change from that ? Works nicely enough for me as a netbook OS. Dual booting for when I want to do anything more intense.
"people who live in the clouds"?
So , not just their heads in the clouds?
This is just BEGGING for a stream of silly jokes.
The image shown also suggests something you will NEVER get through customs when manned by the humourless types so often encountered when entering certain countries.
"Why does your computer look like a child's toy, sir? Do you like childrens' toys?"
And from then on the scene gets ugly very quickly.
Spotify?
On Linux? So one will need a premium account then I guess. If not, I look forward to being able to run Spotify with my freebie account on Linux (I can use the Windows one under WINE right enough, but that's not the point).
As for this whole cloud thing, I really don't get it at times. I thought the "cloud" was all about server images expanding as demand increases, migrating across different data centres and all that stuff. Really good for SaaS etc, but if a client is going to work with it, it will need an always-on connection. A secure one at that! (Hello FireSheep.)
If this is a true cloud platform AIUI (all work done on server, client is merely a display screen) then why the high-specs? All it would need is sub ~1gb RAM and ~4gb SSD, maybe an ARM chip to boot. Or am I missing something? Are these "cloud" apps just bog-standard, FAT clients that use a server for data? A la Outlook, Rhytmbox and most other things. Would explain the storage I guess....
250GB
Dual Boot a proper non-cloudy-lets-store-your-stuff-on-someones-server Linux. Triple boot XP if you *really* need windows.
The obligatory OS2 and 3.1 VMs.
A few videos, a few mp3s and there's yer hard drive gone!
