Nerd Overload
After work today, instead of playing Xbox or flopping in front of the telly as I am wont to do, I installed a new operating system on my netbook.
No! Come back!
Acer’s much vaunted Aspire One netbooks come pre-installed with Linux, which for those who don’t know, is like Windows but much, much more terrifying and counter intuitive. Imagine driving a car, and every time you want to change gear you have to get out and rebuild the gearbox, blindfolded and wearing boxing gloves. That’s what Linux is like.
I hated it. Even installing something as simple as Google Chrome (a literal 2 click 2 minute job in XP) requires the entry of approximately 45 different command lines into the ‘terminal’. Any of these lines are slightly wrong? Even one character? Back to the start for you son, with an error message that might as well have been written in Swahili.
Something needed to change. The netbook is made for the man in the street, who considers Windows to be a complex and magical thing, so it has to be as user friendly as possible. Typing anything that even thinks about including a colon is wrong.
I found out from Lifehacker today about the recently updated Jolicloud OS. It looked the bees knees, but having tried and failed to get a version of the new Google Chrome OS off the ground earlier this week I had pretty low hopes. It seemed simple enough, download the OS and a USB stick tool, plug it in and away you go.
And indeed, away it did go. Jolicloud is Linux based, but has been simplified beyond recognition. Applications (such as Chrome) are installed with the click of an ‘Install’ button, and they install silently in the background. Apps can be run from the ‘launcher’ with a single click, and all of the nitty gritty of drivers, settings etc are dealt with in the install by the OS.
All in all, splendid stuff. I can only think of one downside at the moment; the apps are selected by Jolicloud themselves, so if you want to try the beta test of something new you’ll have to wait until Jolicloud add it to their list of apps (as far as I can tell). Jolicloud appear to to be quite geeky though so they will probanly know about the good stuff before most of us anyway.
I’ve only been fiddling for 2 hours or so, but it’s awesome. If you have an Acer Aspire One, get this, and it becomes a genuine tool for work and leisure, rather than the geeky freak in the corner next to the big shiny proper Windows laptop.
