Tag Archives: netbook

Jolicloud 1.1 Review

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By Jeffrey the Barak

Some of you may have browsed to this review on the-vu between December 16th 2010 and January 17th 2011 and found a very different story. Due to a hardware conflict, namely a radio device in my particular computer, I failed to get Joicloud to work properly in December 2010, but with some kind and patient support from Cedric of Jolicloud, I now have a speedy little Asus netbook that is smaller and lighter than Google’s CR-48 and Jolicloud’s own Jolibook.

The in-depth technical review of the Jolicloud OS (operating system) is not to be found here, and you will also not see any jargon or abbreviations that only Linux-Heads can understand.

For nine out of ten computer users, Jolicloud theoretically gives you everything you need and removes all maintenance. It is designed to be the Linux for the rest of us, no Geek required. There is, in theory, no complicated setup, the system becomes familiar to almost anyone within minutes, and you won’t have to waste time with virus protection, system maintenance, updates, customization, steep learning curves etc. It is designed to be simple and it is officially available many months before Google Chrome OS.

So if you spend most of your time in a web browser, and do only basic editing of pictures, and do not use the most advanced features of say, Excel, for example, then you can find an old computer for thirty, or three hundred dollars, and install Jolicloud and you are set. You only need 1GB of RAM to fly along at breakneck speed, and it will run okay on half that, and your storage, as in hard drive, or perhaps solid state drive, can be tiny if you use the online storage. The only thing you really need is good fast Internet and you are laughing.

Jolicloud and Me:

So my story is, I was waiting and waiting for Google Chrome. I gave up my iPhone because it was too little to work on. I bought and then re-sold an iPad because iOS was not able to allow me to do my work, which basically requires tabbed browsing and the full, non-mobile-telephone versions of web pages such as Google Spreadsheets.

And all the while I had one eye on Jolicloud. So I needed a device that was not heavy  (the iPad was nice and light at least) and there was the Macbook Air for around $1,100 including taxes and fees (California), but everything I do whilst away from my desk is in the browser, and the Chrome browser at that. So if I live in a browser, I don’t need the very powerful and capable Macbook Air since I’m not going to use Garageband or iMovie while I’m on the road.

So then in early December 2010 Google said, “sorry but it may be the second half of 2011 before Chrome OS is ready”. However a few thousand people are testing the Beta on free-of-charge 2GB RAM Atom N550 notebooks supplied by Google. So far, those who write about Chrome OS without using it, don’t like it, and those who write about Chrome OS who are on the pilot program, love it, for the most part. I would have applied myself, but I have a reason for not wanting a portable computer that large and heavy. I already have a five-pound Macbook and that is too big and heavy to be something I want to take around with me.

So with the unavailability of a really nice, extremely lightweight netbook with no hard drive, I decided to get an Asus Eee PC 1015PEM-MU17 netbook and download Jolicloud 1.1 to an installation USB key and run Jolicloud 1.1 as my sole operating system on the Netbook. I went for a dual core, high end Netbook, but still, I got where I am now for a third of the price of the Macbook Air. And it is a nice enough netbook that I can probably resell it without too much of a loss if I grow to dislike it for any reason. Yes, a Macbook Air is worth three times as much, but I just need the browser.

In preparation, I migrated from Apple’s Address Book and iCal to Google contacts and calendar. I did so with a nagging issue in my head. Offline access to the Google calendar and address book is temporarily unavailable until Google rolls out the full new HTML5 version in early 2011, so unless I’m in a hotspot, I will not have access to my calendar and address book by using the netbook that’s sitting in my satchel. These are two things that have always been with me for decades, since the pre-electronic era, so I am feeling a little compromised by this, and have been searching for a good locally installed address book and calendar that can live in Jolicloud and be synched with these two Google services. But I broke down and added an iPod Touch to my arsenal, and that displays my address book and calendar, offline, that is synced with Google whenever it’s near a hotspot. Very nice.

Also in preparation, I created the aforementioned USB key to install Jolicloud 1.1 on the new netbook, which ships with Windows 7, an operating system that I was intending to discard immediately so that the netbook will work for me, instead of the other way around.  It was very easy to download Jolicloud and to create the USB key. Jolicloud.com has the instructions.

I also set up an account on Jolicloud and interfaced with the Jolicloud working environment by logging into my account from the Chrome browser on my 27″ iMac. Very nice and simple!

Proir to trying Jolicloud on the new netbook, I played around in Windows 7, the operatiing system that came free with the netbook. It is a horrible OS, that constantly boasts about what it has updated and waits for you to reward it by clicking OK, and it constantly asks you to protect it with anti-virus software, which in itself keeps you busy all day with dialog boxes and wants you to work for your computer and maintain it so that it will be nice enough to work for you, until the next round of dialogs pop up.

I of course lived in Windows for many years, from 3.0 to XP, but abandoned it just prior to Vista and became a Mac fan. Macs work for the user, users work for Windows.

My first dipping of a toe into the vast cold ocean of Linux was about to begin, and I installed Jolicloud 1.1. It was after all the reason I purchased this netbook.

Back in December I hit a wall of frustration, because I could not get the wireless to work and stay working. So I temporarily gave up on Jolicloud and tried installing two other versions of Linux. Eeebuntu, supposedly designed for EeePC’s, looked terrible and did not work well. Ubuntu Netbook Edition worked well, wifi radio included, but sleep, hibernate, shut down etc did not work at all.

So I decided to ask Jolicloud for help, after all Cedric of Jolicloud had offered some helpful words in response to my not-so-favorable Jolicloud 1.1 review published in December, and since replaced by this article that you are now reading.  And I am glad I did. I was invited to send the contents of two files, “lspci” and “lsusb”, so that my problem could be addressed at Jolicloud. (Okay well that did sound a bit geeky, but they did send easy instructions.) And all the problem was, was a new type of wifi radio in the Asus EeePC 1015-PEM that was not supported in the Jolicloud 1.1 download. All I had to do was run an update and restart, and Bob’s yer Uncle. Jolicloud will soon be changing the download file to the updated configuration to spare everyone else from hitting my wall.

So now that I have Jolicloud running nicely on a nice little netbook I am happy. But I should disclose that all I really intend to run is the Chrome browser, which, once synced to my Google stuff, contains my online universe. Jolicloud is a fast way to get there. And since I have poked around on a couple of other Linux flavors over the weeks, I have to say what I was expecting to say all along, Jolicloud is an excellent interface for simple computing. Again, if you want a more geeky techie complex review of this excellent operating system, Google around for another review,  and if you are the type of person who has bad luck getting any computer to do what you want, then see if you can get an expert to pre-configure and test Jolicloud to your device on your behalf, but once it’s setup, for the end user, Jolicloud is as simple as can be.

Please feel free to post comments on this article.

Jeffrey the Barak is not a computer expert, but is savvy enough to be a go-to-guy for many friends with computer questions.

An opportunity for Jolicloud

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By Jeffrey the Barak.

Jolicloud is a Linux-based operating system for netbooks and also PC’s that is available now and very easy to use. It is all you need if your computing life is all about email, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other activities that require little power and little to no local storage.

But a rumor surfaced a few days ago that Jolicloud my be coming out with hardware, in the form of a cheap netbook, pre-installed with and optimized for, Jolicloud.

This really is OLPP, one laptop per person, at an affordable level.

Why will it succeed? Two reasons. Firstly Google. Everyone is waiting for Chrome, but it never comes out. Each month the expected date gets shoved further into the future and it’s very very late in terms of demand. And secondly, weight. The success of the new Macbook Air which starts at a thousand dollars shows this. No-one chooses to carry a heavy computer, and people are willing to give up quite a lot to get that weight down.

Just as an SLR camera is useless if you left it at home, and an inferior pocket camera is 100% better if you have it with you, the lighter weight of your computer in hand, whether it be an iPad, a Macbook Air or a Netbook, is crucial to how useful it is.

Jolicloud is out now, and it is practically the same as Chrome. It runs your Gmail, your Google Spreadsheets and everything else the as-yet non-appearing Chromebooks would have been running, had they existed today. It easily does things that are very difficult to achieve on your fun, but inherently limited, iPad.

So now it’s all down to marketing. Jolicloud could remain as obscure and scary as everything else based on Linux, and consequently it could be adopted by a tiny fraction of the world, or it could sell in the millions. Clever marketing, a decent quality netbook with a  $200 to $300 price and a 10″ screen are all it needs to become a huge factor in computing, and another major pain in the spleen for that big ship with a hole in it’s hull called Microsoft. The question is, can they break out from the Linux mold and actually succeed, and can they do it soon enough to grab some customers before Google finally brings out those elusive Chromebooks?

Netbook or smartphone?

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By Jeffrey the Barak

I spend most of my waking hours in front of a 27″ iMac. Not that I’m complaining. When I’m not working, I play here too. But sometimes I have to actually leave my desk and be in other places, and then I sometimes need to be connected and do things that involve Internet.

The background to this dilemma:

I was a latecomer to cellular phones, but once I got one I needed it. For mobile organization, I stayed with various versions of Palm Pilots, from III to TX, for years until one day a few years ago I decided that they were all too small for my poor eyesight and large fingers and said, no more.

The plan was to stay with my simple phone, which at the time was a Motorola Razr, and just be patient for communication. I bought a Macbook so I could work away from home, but it was and is, too heavy to have along all of the time.

My plans were sidetracked when my wife bought me the original iPhone for a gift. I considered returning it for an iPod, but being a Mac-Head, I kept it and got used to it. I even began to use texting sparingly, something I could never do with a numeric telephone keypad. And then mainly because of the headphone socket, I upgrade to a white 16GB iPhone in early 2009.

But now the iPhone is not making me happy. It again seems like a too-small, too hard to use device. Yes it synchs well with Mobile Me and is a portable package containing all my stuff, but I rarely use it unless it’s ringing or I’m too far from a computer. It seems really slow too, not the commonly maligned AT&T connection, which always works for me, but the device itself. It can take ten seconds for it to stop messing around and show me today on the calendar.

I was looking at whether to switch to an Android phone like the nice new larger Droid X, because while I may be a Mac-Head, I’m just as much of a Google-Head, using Google Docs and Gmail as heavily as anyone in the universe. I think Android is very cool, especially for a Gmail, Google Docs kind of guy.

But then I remembered what I almost did before the iPhone appeared in some gift wrap, and I am now thinking the way to go will be to wait for the Google Chrome OS netbbooks to come out, get one with a 3G or 4G data plan, or to avoid a data bill, just wi-fi and exercise some patience between hotspots, and replace the iPhone with a simple telephone-only no-data-plan cellphone designed for old farts.

My iphone contract runs until March 2011, so by then there should be a few Chromebooks around (I’m guessing that may be what we call the Chrome Netbooks that will soon dominate world computing), and some 4G choices.

The iPad is no good for me. I think it’s fantastic, but I never watch movies or play games, and it is awful for Google Spreadsheets and heavy email, so no thanks.

And so I’ll hold off on the switch to Android, or the upgrade to iPhone 4, and think hard about a lightweight Chromebook in a hip bag and a simple phone. I have eight months to flip flop in my head, but I think my mind may be made up. I hope there will be a Chromebook with good screen resolution, solid state storage and enough power for the browser’s demands.

Replace:
Macbook + iPhone

With:
Chromebook + simple mobile telephone.

Next year I’ll look at today’s post and see if I was right.

Jeffrey the Barak shared this idea on 25th July 2010


Update August 18th.

 

Well here I am, no action taken, but still waiting for Google Chrome. I have been shopping and played with 10.1 inch netbooks. I can see them! I like them! But why oh why do they have that crazy Windows operating system? It’s just so wrong for a netbook, so wrong.

 

Anyway, a curveball. All of a sudden Google Spreadsheets are easily editable on an iPad, which brings that back into consideration. It may not have a keyboard but with practice it works well, and it’s a no risk purchase because you can resell them on eBay with little or no loss. It has no tabbed browser, but it has the similar feature that lets you switch between browser pages.
And why not the iPad 3G? Because 3G is too slow and unpleasant to work with except in a dire emergency, and the device costs much more, and you get a data bill for every month during which you want to utilize it.
So maybe a $500 16GB wi-fi iPad and a dumb-phone could be the solution. I don’t know, but I’ll update this post when something happens.

Update August 20th.

Thanks for the emails but I wish you would go public and post your comments guys! Well here I am, no action taken, but still waiting for Google Chrome. I have been shopping and played with 10.1 inch netbooks. I can see them! I like them! But why oh why do they have that crazy Windows operating system? It’s just so wrong for a netbook, so wrong.Anyway, a curveball. All of a sudden Google Spreadsheets are easily editable on an iPad, which brings that back into consideration. It may not have a keyboard but with practice it works well, and it’s a no risk purchase because you can resell them on eBay with little or no loss. It has no tabbed browser, but it has the similar feature that lets you switch between browser pages.And why not the iPad 3G? Because 3G is too slow and unpleasant to work with except in a dire emergency, and the device costs much more, and you get a data bill for every month during which you want to utilize it.So maybe a $500 16GB wi-fi iPad and a dumb-phone could be the solution. I don’t know, but I’ll update this post when something happens.

Update August 25th.

Today I took out my old Razr and reactivated my phone number on it, effectively turning the iPhone 3G into an iPod Touch. No more data bill! I will be texting (rarely) using Google Voice from now on and the Razr is, well, a non-smart telephone. Nothing more. I’m selling my 3G as we speak and will wait for the Chromebooks to replace it, although I could buy an iPad or a Jolicloud Netbook to play on and resell that later.

Update July 6th 2011.

So a year has passed. I have not had a telephone data bill for 11 months. I’ve had an iPad and sold it again because it really was too heavy to hold and too uncomfortable to use. (Sorry millions of users). I’ve had a netbook running Joilcloud. And I’ve looked at the Chromebooks which finally came out recently. Chrome OS has not been received warmly, but I like it and could use it, except….the Chromebooks are far too heavy.  So I will be getting a Macbook Air, after the Lion and processor update and subsequent re-release, and spending most of my time on it in the Chrome browser, connected via wifi.


Time for a computing rant

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By Jeffrey the Barak

I should begin by stating that today is April 8th, 2009. This is important whenever writing about technology, or as in this case, ranting about technology, because by the time you read this, things may well have changed.

I am not a computer journalist, I don’t take advertising revenue from Microsoft or Apple or Norton, and I am no programmer. But I do use computers and I know what I like and do not like.

So this rant is partly an observation, partly a wish list, and partly about 1973 Buick Electra converted to run on battery power. (More on that later).

babbage_difference_engine_sRanting about computers, the big kind.

I wrestled with Windows from early 3.0 until late in the XP era, before I became so busy with actual work that I decided it was high time to stop messing around with dialog boxes and virus scans and abandon Microsoft so I could get some bloody work done.

My solution was to switch to Mac. Now I’m not one of these guys who says Apples are perfect and all other fruits are rubbish, because that is an exaggeration, but I will say that I no longer work for the computer. The computer now works for me.

I remain open-minded about where computing may go in the future, but as people who have downgraded to “netbooks” will tell you, there is a future in online application use and assuming being connected continues to become more ubiquitous, that may be our direction.

Ranting about computers, the small kind.

I got into palm-top or handheld computing in the 1990s with a Palm III and dabbled in Windows tablets and then gave it all up when my eyesight deteriorated, only to jump back in when my wife bought me the first iPhone.

I still find Internet use to be a pain in the eye on the iPhone, but I think that on one’s palm is the best place to work in many situations.

But I always wanted to fill the gap between a notebook / laptop computer and a handheld device such as a smart phone. My first attempt at doing so was to buy an Acer tablet computer, but I found the operating system, the hardware and the screen to be very close to completely unusable. It was slow enough to make you scream, awkward to use, and hard to see in almost any light, but only for an hour then the batteries ran down.

I held out hope for Palm’s “Folio Mobile Companion” invention in 2007 only to see them backtrack and cancel the release. And rumors continue to abound about Apple’s plans for something bigger than an iPhone and smaller than a Macbook, with an alternative operating system.

And this is the key, and why the tablet failed for me, something roughly the same size and weight might succeed if it does not try to be a computer. That is: no Windows, no OS X, no full blown Linux, but something more like the iPhone operating system. We have to recognize that a small whatever-you-call-it is not a computer. This is why tablets were awful and also why these new “netbooks” don’t really work well with the Windows OS installed. They come with XP because it’s only about $25 now, but it’s not right for a little ten inch thing.

People who run simple Linux shells to get them online to do stuff get much more satisfaction from their netbooks, without the squinting. It was the same when Palm had two versions of the Trio smart phone, one with Windows Mobile, the big seller, and one with the last version of the Palm OS. The Windows one was terrible because you really need a big screen to work well in Windows. The Palm OS one was less terrible. The little tiny keyboard was never as efficient as Graffiti, if you took the time to learn Graffiti.

The iPhone reminded me that even someone with bad eyes and big fingers can still work in the hand if the OS and also the input method are clever enough, (they are). And as long as there’s an Internet connection, then there is room for a lightweight device that is larger than a pocketable mobile telephone.

Another thing netbooks have done is throw the escalation of processing power and application complication into reverse. This has coincided with the end of the megapixel arms race in digital cameras, and the end of the economic boom, that never should have been a boom in the first place, due to it’s source in hype and debt.

If applications can be usable over the wi-fi, then they will be better if they are less complicated, not more so, so this new small way of thinking can potentially move Microsoft’s fortunes into the hands of Google, Yahoo! etc. Anyone who develops good web-based applications.

Revolutions still to come in display and input technology will add strength to this movement. The tortoise may beat the hare in computing.

So about that electric Buick Electra, oh sorry, I’m out of time.