Jolicloud 1.1 Hands On

Our last review of the Jolicloud 1.0 operating system was very appreciated, and we thought that it will be a very good idea to give you guys a glimpse into the next release, Jolicloud 1.1, which will be available for download/upgrade in November 2010.

The Jolicloud team was kind enough to give us access to an exclusive preview of the upcoming Jolicloud 1.1 operating system for netbooks. As usual, we've tested this first preview of Jolicloud 1.1 on our netbook with the following hardware specifications:

· Intel Atom N450 1.66 GHz processor; · Intel GMA3150 integrated graphics card; · 1 GB DDR2 of system RAM; · 160 GB SATA hard drive; · 1024 x 600 capable WVGA LED LCD.

Jolicloud 1.1 will be provided as an upgrade for existing Jolicloud 1.0 users. It will be based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), and supported until April 2013. But, the good news is that future patches from Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) will also be added in the new Jolicloud 1.1 release.

Jolicloud 1.1 will feature a Linux kernel 2.6.35.4, which provides faster boot/resume/suspend functionality, the latest drivers for video and sound cards, webcams, or Wi-Fi cards, out-of-the-box support for Broadcom, Poulsbo and Nvidia hardware components (yes, that means you won't have to manually install any drivers or modules).

Jolicloud 1.1 will also include an optimized kernel for Intel Atom processors, especially Atom N450 and N550 hardware.

The GNOME desktop environment has been updated to version 2.30, and it provides better battery life, better external monitor support and faster startup time.

In order to provide better support for touchscreen, new hardware, and accelerated video support, X.Org has been updated to version 7.5. Moreover, Plymouth is now used to generate the boot animation; but it also offers a cleaner boot-up and shut-down experience.

Among various interesting application present in Jolicloud 1.1 we can mention VLC Media Player 1.1.4, Chromium 7.0, Dropbox 0.6.3, Abiword 2.8.2, Banshee 1.6.1, Mozilla Firefox 3.6.10, GIMP 2.6.8, Miro 3.0.1, and OpenOffice.org 3.2.1.

GDM (GNOME Display Manager) has been replaced with SLiM Login Manager, which is faster and simpler. The Ubiquity installer and OEM-config were upgraded to version 2.2.25 to offer an user-friendly installation process.

Last but not least, PackageKit has been upgraded to version 0.6.8, in order to offer an easy package installation and upgrade process via Jolicloud's HTML5 interface.

But the good news is that Jolicloud 1.1 will be available for desktop computers and tables also! Moreover, owners of an Intel Atom N550 netbook will enjoy flawless 1080p (Full HD) videos. Even YouTube's 720p flash videos will play flawlessly!

Jolicloud 1.1 is not yet available for download. It will be released next month!