Revealed: the best Linux distro for your netbook

GOS: a heavily web-enabled distro

Contrary to popular belief, GOS doesn't stand for Google OS, but rather for green OS. It is, however, closely linked to Google and Google Apps (it's also another Ubuntubased distro in the vein of EeeXubuntu).

Aside from the emerald colour palette, GOS heavily resembles Mac OS X, with curved edges, a task bar along the top and a set of slick widgets. That eye candy comes at a price, and this is the largest of the distros on test. It runs in at a hefty 694MB for the download and 2GB for the installed OS.

Bear in mind that this limits the disk space available for your own files. It also takes noticeably longer to boot up than the other distros tested. The sound works immediately, as is evidenced by the Microsoft-alike boot sound it plays (thankfully, this can be turned off in the config).

Rhythmbox is the player installed by default, but as with EeeXubuntu, you can't play MP3s out of the box. There's no explanation of why these files are greyed-out when you try to open them within Rhythmbox, but if you use the file browser instead then Totem Movie Player launches – an odd choice for the default MP3 playing app.

Helpfully, a dialog also pops up to enable you to download the codecs. Additionally, OGG files work fine from the off, but playing AVI requires you to download a codec. Again, you're offered the option of downloading this when you open such a file in Totem.

The distro comes with Firefox, Pidgin, and Thunderbird for your web-based activities, but also a link to Google Docs, Google Finance, Google Reader, Picasa and others. Instead of running in your browser, these are run via Prism, a new app from Mozilla that enables you to run web-based apps without all the paraphernalia of a browser. This is an interesting idea, although we found it a little weird to be working in such a plain window!

The other notable addition to this pack of software is that Wine is installed by default, enabling you to transparently run Microsoft programs and Notebook is included to go with it.

In terms of everyday software, Gimp, OpenOffice.org, and XSane are packaged together with some games. Vim is installed but not Emacs, and the default graphical text editor is Gedit.

In the details

There's a set of gadgets that loads at start up: a wireless signal meter, a battery meter, a weather applet, a calendar that can link with Google Calendar and a calculator. We also had an unidentified gadget, which only displayed an error message.

This is quite a lot to fit on a small netbook screen, although you can remove any of these applets by right-clicking on them. Unfortunately, wireless networking on our Eee PC was a no-go. It's fixable (with a replacement kernel), but an enormous nuisance, especially when compared with our experiences with the other distros.

Given that GOS is really intended as a cloud-reliant distro, this seems a really strange omission – it's not as if the developers are trying to keep the image particularly small. We suspect the issue is that GOS isn't particularly aimed at our test Eee PC, unlike the other distros we've tried out here, so the specific wireless card drivers aren't built into the kernel.

On other netbooks, we gather that GOS networking does work well, and we've heard that's also true for the Eee 901. As we mentioned, installing the most recent kernel solved the problem.

We really liked the idea of a heavily net-based distro, which netbooks are absolutely intended for. However, in practice GOS was pretty sluggish, and you can't always rely on your wireless connections to be high-speed to compensate, so it's often frustrating to use on the go.

Without the heavy tie-in to the online content (the various Google Apps) working, GOS is relegated to being just an overlarge and slightly slow version of Ubuntu for netbooks. The eye candy's great, but on a small, low-powered notebook that takes up a lot of processing power as well.

However, this is a great system in a lot of ways and certainly far and away the prettiest of those we tried out. It shows potential for beefier laptops and newer netbooks, too, so keep an eye on this for the future.

Version: 3.1 (based on Ubuntu 8.04.1)
Website: www.thinkgos.com
Price: Free under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence. Verdict: Fabulous eye-candy and online app integration, but can be sluggish.
Rating: 6/10