Running gOS Linux

Bassey · 28-08-2008, 09:34 AM

My Wife's laptop is somewhere around five years old now (it's so old, we can't actually remember) and was crawling to a halt under XP. It's a Dell Inspiron with 15" TFT, 1.5GHz Celeron, 512MB RAM and DVD Drive. A perfectly decent spec but struggling with modern software - probably down to the RAM as much as anything.

We didn't fancy replacing it as there is nothing wrong with it. So, I either backed everything up, re-installed Windows XP and then set everything up again - not something I was looking forward to - or I looked for an alternative.

I've been looking jealously at the Eee PC and it's clones, running their sleak Linux distros with all the apps built in and on minimal spec machines. So, I decided to go with Linux. After all, 99% of the time the machine is used for Internet and email with the odd bit of Word, viewing photos and producing posters and pamphlets for her various businesses. All things for which Linux is ideally suited.

I eventually settled on gOS (stands for Good OS but could easily stand for Google OS). It's Ubuntu Hardy Heron underneath but has an OSX style skin with a bit of Vista thrown on-top in the form of Google widgets. So last night I backed up the laptop (I'd already taken a VMWare image of it and installed it on the Desktop PC so she had access to that if anything went wrong). The backup took half an hour. Then I stuck the gOS CD in. Setup took less than ten minutes.

WiFi set itself up and created a WiFi widget showing available networks, the signal strength and if they were locked. Seconds later I was on the Internet. Firefox 3 is installed by default. A quick install of Foxmarks and all her bookmarks were synched over and he had access to her Yahoo mail and 30boxes calendar. It also created a battery power widget on the desktop.

Five minutes later and her other email account was up and running in Thunderbird via POP. A few minutes to copy all her Docs, pics and music from the external hard drive (which connected and set itself up in a couple of seconds.

gOS has a OSX style Doc-Bar at the bottom with links to the OpenOffice apps, Firefox and a load of Google stuff. However, a utility is provided to add/remove these icons and replace them with links to other stuff. So I stuck thunderbird, Picassa (brilliant photo software), MPlayer (awful media player software - must look up an alternative) and her 30Boxes calendar in there.

In total, I probably spent an hour getting the latop 95% ready - from scratch! I'm jut missing two (very significant) things. Her Outlook mail archive and address book. I'm thinking of signing up for a trial of one of these GooSynch things on her Virtual laptop to get her mail archive from Outlook into GMail - along with her address book - and then import them into Thunderbird from there.

However, she now has a laptop which is easy to use, flies along, has all the software she needs (at no cost), boots and closes in 5-10s and (shortly) will have all her data and settings in a format that will make it easily tranferably between machines and applicatios, making future switches a walk in the park.

I've been playing with Linux on and off for about 12 years now but this is the first time it's ever been a pleasurable experience. Even her printer set itself up and then warned us it was low on ink (which it was)! It's breathed new life into a very old piece of kit and it's like having a brand new machine. I would say it runs quicker than my Core2Duo 2.4GHz desktop with all the latest RAM, Graphics etc.

windows · 28-08-2008, 09:55 AM

Scary stuff that Jim, especially the last part about speed. I'm seriously looking / thinking about doing something similar as a dual boot on the machine here, just to see what can be done / achieved.

Bassey · 28-08-2008, 10:13 AM

For Dual Boot - and particularly if it is for you, I would just go with plain Ubuntu 8.04. It comes with a windows installer (winbu or something similar) which allows you to install it from a Windows application and use windows uninstaller to remove it afterwards if required. It looks after all the dual-booting for you.

gOS is really designed for OEM installs and so likes to be the sole OS. It does provide options for Dual Booting and maintaining the Windows Partition but I've no idea how it works. But the speed is just phenomenal. The only slow part is OpenOffice which has always had problems starting (from double-clicking the icon it takes about 5-10s before anything happens - by which time you've often given up and tried again). However, that is supposed to be fixed in v3 - out soon and available as a beta now.

But, having worked in IT for years and probably installed my first OS 20 years ago, it's the first time I've ever just stuck in a CD, sat back and ten minutes later had a fully functioning machine with NO DRIVER issues.

windows · 28-08-2008, 10:19 AM

Hmm tempted, the Unbunto distro, that definitely handles dual booting of Vista painlessly?

The driver problem might have been erradicated though as you are using older hardware on the machine?

Bassey · 28-08-2008, 10:24 AM

I was worried the older hardware would be the problem. The printer, in particular, is not a well known model and I had problems getting XP drivers for it! Even then it would frequently uninstall itself and hang. gOS was plug-n-play.

Ubuntu handles Vista dual boot perfectly.

windows · 28-08-2008, 10:26 AM

Oooh I may well give it a go later then!

Bassey · 28-08-2008, 01:14 PM

and I think I have solved the Outlook->Thunderbird problem. KiGoo is a free app that lets me synch Outlook with GMail/GCalendar. Once all the data is up there from the virtual image of the laptop, I can boot gOS and set up a new account within Thunderbird to connect over IMAP. I use Thunderbird through IMAP to connect to my Exchange server on the desktop and it's very good.

That should be fairly simple and quick (ha!).

johnston411 · 28-08-2008, 01:20 PM

The ubuntu os's seem, from my very limited experience, to be the most user friendly linux distros around.

I use amarok for music on ubuntu and vlc for all video playback.

It is nice when you install something and it just works out of the box.

Spent 6 hours yesterday sourcing drivers for an iqon phillips desktop xp machine for a colleague as it couldn't find them.

I haven't tried Gos but i may give it a whirl. is there a live cd for it?

Oh and if you get a chance have a play with advanced desktop settings and compiz.

windows · 28-08-2008, 01:32 PM

Well I decided to bite the bullet and give it a go..... Now posting this from Firefox within Ubuntu

Not dropped back to Vista yet to see if it will still boot okay, but at least got this far.

A couple of issues at the moment, like that the install does not see my second monitor at all, and that the sound level is stuck on full volume which is scary..

At least the rest of it seems to be there. Now I've got it though no idea where to go from here!

Bassey · 28-08-2008, 02:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnston411

I use amarok for music on ubuntu and vlc for all video playback.

Excellent, I'll give Amarok a try then. I don't think she's too bothered about video other than YouTube so MPlayer is fine for now.

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnston411

I haven't tried Gos but i may give it a whirl. is there a live cd for it?

The ISO download from their website IS a live CD. I booted off that and ran it from the CD. The desktop then has an icon to run an installer if you like what you see. Just bear in mind that any setting up you do on the Live CD version won't get replicated accross if you choose to install to disc.

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnston411

Oh and if you get a chance have a play with advanced desktop settings and compiz.

gOS turns off all the advanced stuff. I did work my way through an Ubuntu tutorial a fw weeks ago that basically turned Ubuntu into OSX. No particular point to it but it did demonstrate the awesome flexibility of Ubuntu.

What's compiz?

I keep meaning to get emacs installed. I have fond memories of that from 10+ years ago when I was a PERL/CGI programmer on BSD.