Jolicloud On Netbook

I came across a lifehacker article “Five Best Netbook Operating Systems” and looking at the top one, it was a distro called Jolicloud that I had not tried out before.

I have a netbook that was just setting there gathering dust and since Laura was complaining about not having a laptop, and always wanting to use mine. I thought I would give the distro a try. Previously I had been using Ubuntu Eeepc version, which was kinda sluggish.

Jolicloud’s website is very slick and helpful in getting the iso and with very clear instructions on installing it.

So after I figured out how to boot from the USB Stick I was up and running in no time. For some reason for my netbook to boot from the USB Stick, I need to add the USB Stick as a HD in the BIOS settings and obviously add it to the first media to boot from.

Jolicloud does require you to register an account with them, but this is probably due to the way they handle the managing the apps installed on your system. They do push the friends/social aspect as well, which is something I am not interested in. The other thing that I have not worked out is the lack of Flash in the browser. Looking in Synaptic it looks like the plugin is installed, but alas no luck with youtube.com etc. That is something that I need to get sorted out before Laura would even consider using the netbook as she likes her Scrabble on Facebook. The version I am using is labeled pre beta, so that could be an indicator that they are still getting things sorted out.

Other than the above issues this distro really does make the netbook feel a lot more responsive and usable.