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.






Ranting about computers, the big kind.