Review of the GOS Operating System

Wal-Mart is now offering the gPC, which is a sub $200 PC for the Christmas shopping season with a slight catch. The catch is that the operating system something other than Windows Vista or Windows XP. The gPC is runs something called gOS, which is a new and free operating system that is derived from the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. The Wal-Mart store website has shown that the computer's have been out of stock from the first day that it was introduced, and I have had difficulty finding one in stock locally. This is not too much of a surprise since Everex, the maker of the PC based in Taiwan, has stated that they only plan on selling 10,000 units of the gPC, and only around 600 Wal-Mart stores will participate in the sales. It looks like these units will be hard to find this upcoming holiday sales season.

I am interested in purchasing this new system and give it try as a cheap alternative for the kids. They are always looking to use our family PC, looking for school homework information on the web, sending e-mails, and blogging. And now my 4 year old is even starting to get into the computer act now. It is amazing at how young they start these days. For an all around Internet box, that runs a few linux games, the gPC looks like the solution that I need to cut down the line for the family PC. Plus, you cannot beat the price.

I decided that I would give the operating system a run through before I make the purchase of the hardware. You can download a copy of the operating system from thinkgos.com and save the .iso file. From there you burn it to a CD using software that can create a bootable disk from a .iso file. There are many "How-To's" on this process works, and most Windows-based PC's with a CD burner now include the needed software to burn the CD.

The great thing about the gOS, and the Ubuntu distribution it is derived from, is that they are both packaged with what is called a LIVE CD. This means you can pop the CD into your drive, set the PC to boot from the CD and give the operating system a test drive, without touching or overwriting any files on your PC. When you are done you simply shut the PC down and restart your computer into Windows with absolutely no harm to your system.

Since it has been so hard to find this new PC at Wal-Mart, and I wanted to give the new OS a test drive, I went ahead and burned a copy of the LIVE CD and tried it out on a couple of my PCs. I suspect this particular distribution is set up for a specific model of PC, namely the $199 special at Wal-Mart. I did not expect it to be fully compatible with my PC hardware, but I was able to get it running on my wife's laptop, a Dell Inspiron 5150 with 2.8 Ghz CPU and 512 RAM. Everything worked fine except the wireless card, which I fully expected since an install of ndiswrappers is needed for most wireless cards when running Ubuntu. Even the sound worked great.

Startup
Booting from the LIVE CD takes you to a menu and you select he first option. The machine boots straight into the green desktop, hence the name gOS or "greenOS". The has been speculation on the Internet that the "g" actually stands for "Google". I certainly can see why there is such speculation and we will get to this little later in the review.

I expected the operating system to be slow since it was running from the CD drive, but actually it was very snappy. It seemed to run a lot more efficiently from the CD than the Windows XP that resides on the laptop's hard drive, with zero wait time starting and stopping applications. I would expect similar type performance, if not better, running from a hard drive installation on the $199 machine which sports an energy efficient 1.5 Ghz processor.

Enlightenment
Enlightenment is the windows manager that is used in gOS. This is different than the standard Ubuntu distribution which comes with Gnome. I noted that the Synaptic Package manager is installed with gOS, so it should be a snap to install the standard Gnome desktop that comes with Ubuntu. However, after playing around with Enlightenment, I just might keep it around for a while.

With Enlightenment running the gOS theme, the desktop layout is more similar to OSX than either the standard Windows desktop or Ubuntu's Gnome. There is an application panel along the bottom that behaves almost like the Dock in OSX. In Enlightenment, this is called a "shelf", and you you can place any number of "gadgets" on your shelf to display system status, email alerts, etc. Any number shelves can be displayed on the top or bottom of the desktop or along the sides. There is a menu for quick access to shelf icons along the bottom, and a quick menu that access the standard Ubuntu applications.

The shelf has a nice scrolling feature. As you move the mouse over the icons, they will animate in a similar fashion to OSX's Dock. If there are too many icons for the shelf, they simply scroll off the side. The shelf also has an area reserved for inactive programs. When windows are minimized, they are automatically placed there. This makes it very easy to access everything on the dekstop. There are a couple of themes that you can choose from in the downloaded version of gOS, and they are quite easy to change from theme the theme.

Nearly all window management systems now have multiple or virtual desktops. For example, there is "Spaces" in OSX. Linux has had this feature for years, depending on what windows manager you use. I found that configuring virtual desktops in Enlightenment quite intuitive, using a slider bar arrangement for the number of desktops, and how you wish to have them arranged on the shelf. If you are into OSX's Dock and Spaces, and the nice eye candy they bring to the desktop, then you will have no problems using the shelf and desktop manager in Enlightenment.

Another similarity I found to OSX is that the window decorations in the gOS theme are similar to OSX. The window quick access buttons are located on the same upper corner as in the OSX platform, and they use a similar color schemes as well. It took a little getting used to, since I am primarily a Gnome and Windows XP user. If OSX is not for you, you can easily switch themes in Enlightenment.

gOS Applications
Ubuntu is considered to be a slimmed down version of Linux, and it seems that gOS has slimmed things down even MORE. On the download version, there were quite a few applications that are standard in Ubuntu which are not included with gOS. The bulk of missing applications seem to be those that are centered with system administration. For example, I could not find a menu entry to add and remove users. I know this can easily be done from the command line, but most users may prefer graphical tools. This is something I will need to verify on the gPC, since I will have multiple users in my home who like there desktops set just right.

I was able to find a network manager after a little searching. It can also be noted that there is a wireless manager included, possibly included to prepare for the sub $300 laptop due out shortly.

A big plus is that Ubuntu's Add/Remove programs manager is included. It was buried under the System Tools menu, so if there is anything that is missing, you can go out and get with no problem. In addition, gOS sports the synaptic package manager, as well as the update manager for getting system updates.

Google, Google Everywhere
The desktop seems like a big advertisement for Google, as everything you click on in the shelf will bring up a website that is either owned or sponsored by Google in some way. There is even a google search bar in the upper right hand corner. This is not necessarily a bad thing for me, since I do use these web sites, and quite often they are quality sites.

My guess is that the producers of gOS are using this little trick as a marketing ploy by making it look like gOS is a Google sponsored desktop. Since they are only linking to websites, there are no licensing or copyright infringements. Also, notably absent from gOS was Google Earth, which has become fairly a popular flagship Google application. With everything on the shelf pointing towards Google in someway, it can easily be seen why some pudits on the Internet are considering the "g" in gOS as standing for Google, when it really is "green."

There were also a couple of websites that I have never heard of but was able to give a try. One was something called meebo.com It appears to be an online instant messaging service which allows you to access your chat software through a web interface. I may or may look into this at some future point.

Here is a listing of applications that I found on the gOS shelf:

Firefox
gmail
meebo
google news
google cal
google maps
google docs
google product search
facebook
youTube
Wikepedia
blogger
skype
xine movie player
rythymbox music player
Tech support (Faqly)

Most of these are simply Firefox bookmark entries. When you click on an icon in the shelf, it simply opens up into a new Firefox tab, which is a nice feature.

So Why Green?
This is because of the low power consumption of the gPC. It is said that the gPC will consume only between 2 and 20 watts of power.

Overall impression
I like what I see so far. I have never used Enlightenment so I have not checked everything yet, but I think this will be a great solution for my kids. I also think that the older generation that may have not yet been indoctrinated into using Windows, my find the gOS as very intuitive to use. The operating system will run great on low end PC's.

As far as usability on low end PC's, gOS wins hands down against Vista and even OSX. The drawback, as with any linux based operating system is compatibility with software that OSX or Windows uses. Many free software solutions help make up for this using the Synaptic package manager.

Now if I can only find one for sale...