Black Box Computers

gOS Review November 30, 2007

I’m a bit of a Linux nut.  In fact I love Linux and everything it stands for – so I decided to look at some of the more “mainstream” Linux distros out there.

In my search I came across the gPC (or GreenPC for those of you who aren’t familiar with it).  This is a new $200.00 PC produced for WalMart.

The PC itself is nothing fantastic, but the impressive part is that it is the first wide range stab at mainstream Linux.

I did a bit of research and found the gOS web page, and a Live CD (http://www.thinkgos.com/), loading it up on VmWare I decided to see how it really does compare with other Linux OS’s like Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Debian.

First things first:

Boot up

It booted pretty quickly (even in a vm) but the bootsplash was a bit amateur looking, the colours were a bit off and the “roundness” wasn’t very round.  This doesn’t really impact actual use, but it is a “first impression” – and I wasn’t impressed.

Once it loaded, I noticed that the multiuser functionality of Linux had been all but removed, no login screen, no setup, no configure.  This may be different after it’s installed (like ubuntu off which it is suppose to be based), but I couldn’t judge for myself there.

The interface, very green, isn’t too bad.  I’ve always had a soft spot for the enlightenment window manager and this is a good representation of what I liked about it.  The right click menu was easy to use, and all my “favorite” applications where in the right click menu.  The reaction time was good, and it wasn’t as hardware intensive as most “enlightenment” based distributions.

As far as applications go it was pretty complete, Web, Wordprocessing, email etc all included, but with a VERY HEAVY LEAN toward “google”.  The WordProcessor is Google Documents, the email = Gmail.  It was very google intensive.  This did NOT impress me, for several reasons, AbiWord is an excellent word processor, much more complete than google, and 100% free – it could have (easily) replaced the online google equivalent.  And it should have, all other features, like gmail should have been given at least a lightweight alternative like thunderbird (less light weight but still very useful), kmail or something – let’s face it, this PC is useless without a high speed online connection, which leads me to my next point.

Who is the target audience?  Well, one would assume that whoever is purchasing a $200.00 alternative operating system pc is either someone who WANTS an alternative operating system pc, or someone who doesn’t know better.  Who shops at WalMart?  someone who doesn’t know better!  so what I think will end up happening is that the less knowledgeable user is going to purchase this PC, bring it home, and find out that it is utterly useless without a broadband internet connection, and if they can’t afford it, or there is only modem access from their home (the pc doesn’t come with a modem), then they are out of luck.  Their first Linux experience is a $200.00 brick.

People who knowledgeablly purchase this Linux based PC probably won’t stick with gOS since they already have their own favorite “flavor” of Linux, and the hardware is very supportive of that.

All in all, the operating system is what I expected it to be – a hacked together Ubuntu Englightenment mash up, making me think back to very early Kbuntu distributions.  Yes it has a long way to go, but it is well on it’s way, and it’s traveling at an encouraging stride.   The actual PC hardware, in my opinion, is a poor idea – and will probably hurt Linux due to the lack of usefulness in the operating system  for perceived new users.