Jolicloud - may just become the best Linux for your netbook?

I've been waiting to write this for about 6 months, since I first heard of Jolicloud, a revolutionary new linux based OS for netbooks.

The fact that Jolicloud is based on Ubuntu stands it in good stead already. But Joliclouds developers have invested a significant ammount of effort in changing the way the the OS approaches applications and - the clue is in the name - takes a more cloud computing friendly approach to their deployment.

Installing the alpha was completed in about 25 minutes from a 2GB USB stick and was a very simple process. Clear instructions were provided on the site for both creating the USB and running the installation. The installation is also familiar - it's the same as the standard Ubuntu installer and making the same choices delivers an installation.

So what's the difference? Well, Jolicloud is designed to take a much more web-based / cloud computing approach to delivering applications and services to your netbook. After the install has completed, you have only a relatively basic set of applications in place, and, on first inspection no obvious way to add them (Synaptic doesn't appear in the application menu as it normally would) ... then you follow the instructions and log into the Jolicloud and it all starts to make sense.

This is where the key difference between Jolicloud and other Linux distributions shows up. Synaptic is now replaced by a much more visual and interactive menu that includes updates, application installation as well as including notifications, profile management and (in the future) community elements. It's this that helps to make Jolicloud such an interesting package.

Where have I go to now? Well. I have the usual Firefox / Mozilla / OpenOffice combination installed. In addition, I have Wine and Winedoors (the latter had to be downloaded and installed manually), and running on that I have Flash 8, Dreamweaver 8 and Photoshop CS2. The only thing that I needed to install by hand with Synaptic was Rhythmn Box. A music player is available, but just wasn't what I wanted. I think the key point of this is that should you need to do something by hand, you can, and it doesn't break everything.

I've been running for over a week now, and it's all good. It's easy, even for an Alpha, I haven't yet found something that doesn't work. I like it, and by the time this has reached a final release I suspect Ubuntu 9.04 is going to face a serious challenge (if not and outright winner) in the netbook market.