I’ve lost count of the number of OSes I’ve tried on my netbook (an Asus Eee PC 901, btw). It started with WinXP then I’ve tried various flavors of Linux and even made a Hackintosh, but since I switch off XP one thing or another didn’t work quite right. Maybe the sound, or microphone, or webcam, or something. Rather annoying for sure.
It’s safe to say then that I’m always on the look out for a new potential OS to try. It also helps that I don’t keep files on my netbook. If I’m going to do any work on it, I’ll save it to a flash drive or DropBox. This way I can just flip to another OS in a heartbeat. With with Eeebuntu just not cutting it, I saw a post on Jolicloud—Preview of Jolicloud: The social Netbook OS | Web Crawler – CNET News—and thought, what do I have to lose. Fine, besides and hour or so trying to get it working.
Funny thing, I was wrong.
The darn thing worked right away.
I booted from a flash drive (not only do they provide the ISO, but nice USB boot disk creator too), and wow, even the mic worked.
Huh.
In fact everything seemed to work. So I decided to install it.
Not only did the install go faster than I expected, everything worked as expected. It seemed though that there weren’t many apps installed. Then I saw the little “Get Started” icon under Favorites. I launched it (turns out to be a slick SSB) and wowsers. After a quick account setup I could just slipstream install apps like these:
Yep, the screencam works. Screenshots work (clearly). DropBox works (that’s how I got the screenshot over here to yon Mac). Even the processor throttling works!
I don’t know what these folks at Jolicloud did to make all this stuff work (since a lot of netbook come with Linux installed it shouldn’t be hard to get things straight) when others couldn’t, but I’m glad they did.
If you have a mediocre OS on your netbook, just Jolicloud a shot. Can’t hurt. In fact you might even find your netbook is suddenly really useful!
