First Experience with Jolicloud 1.1

After reading David Meyer's interesting look at the first Jolibook, I decided to take a shot at upgrading the two netbooks I have Jolicloud 1.0 loaded on. There are two ways to approach this task; systems running Jolicloud 1.0 will eventually receive a notice that the 1.1 update can be installed, or you can go to the Jolicloud download page, pick up either the ISO image or Windows Installer, and install it yourself from scratch.

I decided to try it both ways. First, I booted Jolicloud 1.0 on my Samsung N150 Plus; it didn't take long before I got a message saying "Jolicloud 1.1 is available, you will be notified when it is read for installation on your netbook". As yet, nothing more has happened on that system. At the same time, I downloaded the Jolicloud 1.1 ISO image, and the Jolicloud USB Creator, and created a bootable USB stick. I then used that to make a fresh installation of Jolicloud 1.1 on my Lenovo S10-3s. Note that this is really a "clean" install, so if you take this approach, be sure to save any user data before you start.

The installation process took about 20 minutes, and seemed to be identical to installing Jolicloud 1.0 (and Ubuntu 10.04). As with the 1.0 release, you must be connected to the Internet in order to run the installation, and you must have a Jolicloud or Facebook account, or you have to create one before installing. Once the installation is done and you reboot to the Jolicloud 1.1 desktop, there is a new icon at the bottom right corner of the screen; click that, and you can change the desktop wallpaper to something like this:

That is certainly better than the standard black background that Jolicloud has had until now. The "scenery" icon is visible at the bottom right corner of this screen shot. It is slightly disappointing that you can't install whatever wallpaper of your choice, but at least there is a fairly good selection to choose from. When you click the icon, you get a horizontally scrolling list of available wallpapers, like this:

This is of course only a cosmetic change, and there have been a lot more important changes made behind the scenes in Jolicloud 1.1. The entire distribution has been brought up to the level of Ubuntu 10.04 (note, not 10.10!). Some things have been moved to make them more accessible, such as the "Local Apps" and "Local Settings" folders shown on the desktops above. The Release Announcement gives a quick overview, and the Under the Hood blog entry gives a lot more technical detail, and a list of upgraded applications.

I will continue waiting for the upgrade to be offered and installed on the Samsung netbook. It will be interesting to see how that compares to just reinstalling from scratch.

jw 9/12/2010