gOS

The gOS distribution is based on the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution. It uses the Enlightenment 17 window manager instead of the usual GNOME or KDE desktops, allowing for lower memory and speed requirements. Therefore gOS starts to work reasonably well on systems as low end as a 1GHz Pentium III with 256MB RAM. Due to the fact it leans heavy on on-line applications built on Web 2.0 and AJAX technology it also does not use much hard disk space for applications, the whole system fits comfortably in less than 2 GB of hard disk space. Also many of the documents created with gOS, such as Google Docs documents, can be saved on Google servers instead of on the local hard disk, so gOS can work with very small hard disks. In this respect a gOS PC has many similarities with a Thin client. gOS primary features include a Mac OS X-like Dock featuring icons for the following applications: Firefox web browser, Google Mail, Google News, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Froogle, the Blogger YouTube and Facebook online communities as well as Meebo to online chat with Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger users, Rhythmbox (ITunes like program for music and radio), Skype, Wikipedia, and the Xine media player. The rightmost icon is for Faqly, a system developed for gOS to offer a built-in online community based help system. Other programs can be added to the Dock as well. gOS also supports mini applications that run on the desktop, such as the clock. Also available are a number of card, board and puzzle games, the photo and picture editing program the Gimp and the OpenOffice.org office suite. Google desktop search is integrated into the top right-hand corner of the desktop. gOS is still in the alpha stage and is missing some features, the most obvious being a trashcan.