My little blue Aspire One has been in the menders - a battery problem cured by a Bios upgrade apparently - or so the nice people at John Lewis said. As I don't use a netbook that often, it was not too inconvenient to be without for two weeks. Or rather it would not have been had not my invite to the private alpha of Jolicloud OS not come through.
I had spotted Jolicloud via a tweet from Clay Shirky and it had caught my attention because of the absolutely gorgeous looking user interface. Based on Ubuntu, it stood a chance of working as well.
Install of the alpha release was a breeze, with everything (including sound - can be a sticky area I understand). The UI worked as well as it looked in the initial screen-shots and passed my informal 'is-it-close-to-OS X' intuitive UI bling test*. The best feature however,is the 'app store' like interface for downloading and installing software - no searching for a Skype package or a Twitter client (provided by a Prism-ed web application). Not every package known to the Ubuntu universe, but that is a strength - my 8inch screened netbook can not display anything like a proper development environment - that is not the point. Jolicloud and the Aspire excel at providing a serious portable computer with all of my communications options to keep in touch, a word processor and that's it.
Jolicloud is now in open beta and has a HTML5 installer. The code, at least in my experience, is excellent and I have not had any problems. It can be run in a partition, allowing you to keep your current OS, so very little risk there as well. If you have a netbook, it is supported by Jolicloud and particularly if you are still using the identikit-Linux that it arrived with, I would recommend you try it.
* Not very scientific, but as I spend 10 hours a day lashed to my 24" iMac, all UIs get compared to my normative experience, OS X. BTW,Windows 7 passes as well - must be getting soft.
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