“gOS is made by Everex, a mid-range PC vendor. It’s based on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 and runs the Enlightenment E17 interface instead of KDE or Gnome. Despite not being created by Google, the focus of gOS is Google’s online applications such GMail, Google News, Google Maps, Google Calendar, YouTube, etc. It’s a neat concept for a Linux distribution, but how practical is it? We’ll find out in this review.”
I wanted to give it a try, but unfortunatly, the CD would not boot on my PC, despite working fine with regular Ubuntu. I mostly wanted it as an already assembled Enlightenment 17 based distro.
If you want to try it just to see how it looks and operates you can load it in vmware or qemu. Someone else had suggested this in a related article. I loaded it this way and it works fine. The only odd thing I saw was when loading it into vmware gOS saw the IDE drives as SCSI drives even though the configuration had no SCSI listed. It still loaded fine and was pleasing to use.
If you are interested in e17 you could also try out elive ( http://www.elivecd.org ). It’s based on debian (testing IIRC).
If you really READ the article you notice that there isn’t much to read. Overall it sounds like something that even I could make during toilet break and you wouldn’t need to visit taco restaurant before that. This just shows how sad and bad technology journalism is these day, I think the Sun article of David Beckhams tits had more words.
I liked the “toilet break” part, reminded me the Helen Keller joke, LOL.
There isn’t a single day without a gOS review. As some would say, gOS is the next big thing. Maybe it’s because many people identify gOS as a Google product. Anyway, I think it’s an nice and fresh little distro but enough switching, I’ll stick to my old-school distro.
“Another problem is that there seems to be no “recycling bin” available on the desktop.”
Didn’t see it as a problem and thought the reviewer was just nitpicking since I dont recall Ubuntu Gutsy having a recycling bin on the desktop either though thats based on Gnome.Then, I looked at the ibar and none is there as far as I can tell.Ubuntu has one on the lower taskbar of Gnome,default.A blunder on gOS I think.
Otherwise the review was interesting in Jim Lynch’s typical Extremetech “lite” style.Oh, and the title of the article was bit “flamish” IMHO.
Edited 2007-11-20 17:50
I dont recall Ubuntu Gutsy having a recycling bin on the desktop either
Bottom panel right corner – oh you spotted it. The point is I think that Enlightenment does not have have a recycling bin either and that gOS is having to develop one.
This means that, unless you use a file manager like EmelFM2 that has it’ own inbuilt trash directory, it is difficult to recover a file once you have wiped it.
Edited 2007-11-21 13:53
Its Minimal OS, choosing sensible defaults over large number of tweaks and Maximum application. It surprises me that today someone has focused on the applications, using the memory and resources instead of the memory, it surprises me even more when looking back enlightenment was the heavyweight browser. Nice to see interest focused on what was…and maybe still is the prettiest browser.
The idea behind gOS and the screenshots are nice. However, actual useage is somewhat of a disapointment. Because the icons float there without any real space defined for them. It is somewhat confusing. Also the google bar at the top needs work as it seems to overlap randomly at times.
For some reason my install kept the screen res at 800×600 even after I used the admin screen tool to change to 1048×768.
The menus are confusing they have almost the same naming for each user and admin tool making it hard to navigate to find the correct settings.
The base install is nice and light with everything most people will need from the start with the package manager there ready to install everything you want.
Id have liked to have seen a better ‘skin’ the weird green bubbles just don’t do it for me.