MOOSE, the OS with antlers? 
A mØØse bit my sister Ønce…
In real life, this is going to be a failure. I tried the liveCD, I’d just just buy a pawnshop 'puter and install plain ubuntu, maybe kubuntu. Wal*Mart has tried before to get a low-priced box out there-- Clearly, they want folks to buy cheap working pc’s. Last time around, it was that Lindows mess.
I remember my first linux install. I thought I was so cutting edge by installing Mandrake with The Sims…
Until folks understand that GAMES WON’T WORK UNTIL YOU LEARN HOW TO MAKE THEM, fuck it.
And I haven’t even bothered to see what happens to gOS users who run wine. Why should I? FAIL!
Uh, reality check: Most people don’t run games on their computers. Most people use email and browse the web and maybe edit some documents. Maybe. Until Microsoft produces an OS that’s ready for the desktop, these people can do without Vista’s driver hassles and endless re-activation nonsense. MacOS X is close to being ready, but Apple will never reduce their prices low enough.
Derleth, Most folks who buy their first computer at walmart, are going to want it to run the games sold there. Reality check back atcha.
The funny part is going to be that 50% of the people who buy these things wont even have high speed internet…making most of the “apps” inaccessible and or irrelevant.
One word of caution…you get what you pay for. We once had a Wally World PC under the eMachine brand name with (supposedly) Windows on it. The first Windows patch that came out crashed our PC because Wally World was selling some watered down version of Windows that couldn’t handle the patches. But how would a consumer know that?
In short, Wally World and eMachines made a killing from PCs incapable of truly performing online…if you want little things like security patches, etc.
For a bit more money, you can get a Zonbu PC and be environmentally friendly! [
I managed to find some download mirrors last night and I’m installing gOS on one of my test machines right now - it’s a liveCD-based install (no text install option was offered). I don’t like installing Linux that way, as liveCDs can be really sluggish on lower spec machines, but this one doesn’t seem too bad on a 500MHz Pentium III
Initial impression (of the desktop environment the LiveCD provides):
-It’s trying very hard to look like OSX - don’t know how much of this was a choice imposed by the desktop environment (Enlighten) - it has a desktop clock widget, a ‘dock’ at the bottom (not just a row of shortcuts - it’s a scrolling dock). Even the desktop background image is an overlapping curvy gradient thing that I saw first on OSX (although it has many other imitators now). The Windows have Mac-style decoration, and circular control buttons on the top left.
Install process seems fairly standard. I’ll post again when I actually get to boot the thing for real.
Installation has finished and it’s booted up now.
The desktop environment is actually a curious mixture of concepts. The ‘dock’ is actually something called a ‘shelf’ and it appears any number of these can be set up and placed. Although this is somewhat similar to OSX, there’s no top menu bar. There is a leaf-shaped icon at the bottom left of the screen and this functions in a way that is conceptually similar to the Windows Start button.
You don’t have to scratch very hard to see Ubuntu underneath, in fact there’s a flash of the Ubuntu peachy-brown background at login, before the gOS desktop environment appears.
Apart from that, what’s to say? Nearly all of the standard apps on the bottom shelf are web-based stuff - in fact are just bookmarks, but it’s possible to modify this selection and add icons for your own choice of apps - Synaptic Package Manager is there, so anything you can install and run in Debian/Ubuntu looks to be available here. The repositories listed are the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon ones, but oddly, not many of them are selected by default - in fact none of the updates were checked, so the update checker will come up empty every time for people who don’t know to change that setting.
Oh, now here’s an interesting little thing. One of the trusted software sources listed is… ‘GooglePC Team’ - googlepc.com - however, that domain doesn’t actually appear to belong to Google - it’s registered to a private individual through GoDaddy - whose email is at tgc2.com/ (the home page for which just has an enigmatic logo on it, but one that matches the gOS theme).
So all in all, it looks like it’s nothing much more complex than Ubuntu Gutsy with a different desktop environment based on Enlightenment.
And there’s nothing wrong with any of that - in fact it just works better than Gnome in some ways - for one thing, it’s not all in your face - it’s minimal, but it’s there when you want it, but it’s also quite lightweight, which means that performance is quite slick even on an older machine.
So. Interesting. I’d consider using this distribution in preference to Ubuntu if I was setting up a machine for a relative who wanted things kept nice and simple.
Hmmm… this little thing is a bit shoddy; the dock/shelf thing includes a YouTube icon, which opens that site in Firefox, but there’s no flash plugin installed by default, so the videos don’t show.
It’s easy enough to install Flash, but it’s a bit of a glaring omission.
I’m curious about OpenOffice , Mangetout. Is it actually installed on the machine or accessed through the web, and does its word processor and graphics program work similarly to Word and Paint? In other words, would I be able to create documents, fliers, images and so forth similar to the way I can with Windows?
OpenOffice is installed locally by default. on gOS (and on its ancestor, Ubuntu)
It’s really quite a good replacement for Microsoft Office - unless there’s some advanced feature of Office you need (VB scripting, for example), you’ll probably find it entirely adequate (actually, you could install it on whatever computer you’re using at the moment to test if it’s a good fit before committing).
You can create files that will open in Microsoft Office applications, and open files others have created in MS Office (although I’m not sure if it supports the very latest MS file formats)
That’s what I wanted to know. Thanks for the info.
Just wanted to check back in: I found gOS to be mostly annoying-- I went back to plain ubuntu. Really, isn’t Gnome easier for linux novices than enlightenment? Also, there was waaaaay too much green. If I can find one, I’m going to go ahead and do the straight ubuntu thing.