Filed under: Internet, OS Updates, Linux, Office, Open Source, Beta
Ulteo releases Linux desktop; bent on world domination
by Kristin Shoemaker Apr 22nd 2008
When we last left our favorite evil geniuses at Ulteo, they were diligently plugging away at making OpenOffice.org applications accessible through a browser. Now, they've taken their plans for global domination one step further with Ulteo Application System Beta 1 (codename "Sirius"). For those of you wondering what exactly an "Application System" is: Think operating system. Yes, Ulteo's Sirius is a Linux distro designed to integrate nicely with the online applications they provide. For instance, saving a document to a specific folder "auto-syncs" with the Ulteo servers online. It's then accessible from other computers through your Ulteo web account.
Of course, that isn't all of Ulteo's new tricks. Allegedly all upgrades, patches and bugfixes for installed applications will be automatically downloaded and installed on your system. You know, without any human intervention. We'll be the first to admit that it's our all-too-human intervention that mucks up a lot of our software, but not always. Somehow, we're just a little uneasy not knowing exactly what our machine is plotting against us with each new update.
Still, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for people who use their computers for dedicated office work fewer than twenty-seven hours a day and don't want to bother learning Linux (or Windows, or Mac, for that matter). It'll be nice to see this project unfold and emerge from beta.
Because it is still very beta. Our 64-bit dual processor computer needed the noapic command added to the kernel to boot (which isn't unusual for 32-bit Linux on this box). The first boot, even with the noapic option, pooped out on a filesystem check. The third boot attempt was the charm.
After the very disturbing boot artwork (orange people scare us!), the KDE environment loaded nicely and actually fairly quickly, especially compared to other liveCDs. There was a bit of lag and a truly annoying "Rate this page!" sidebar in Firefox that we couldn't seem to shake, but functionally it seems as though this could be a decent distribution for what would seem to be a large niche market of new-Linux-users-who-don't-care-what-OS-it-is.
Keep an eye on Ulteo. First, it was web apps. Then, operating systems. Isn't that how every empire starts?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Stuart Halliday said 3:21PM on 4-23-2008
So it's in effect trying to copy the NC concept which originated in the UK with the Acorn/Oracle NC £99 device?
The concept is very old, servers were doing this in the 1970s. But are the public too entrenched with their PCs to swap it with a little box?
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