Joy of using Jolicloud on my Netbook

I am an early adopter of eeepc but never got a chance to write about it in detail. EEEPC became part of my must carry travel gadgets during my euro trip last year. Ever since them I have carried it to multiple conferences and backpack travels. The only problem I faced was battery life which was around 3.5hrs. Mind you I have the first gen 701 ssd, the recent ones have around nine hours of battery backup.
By default it had Xandros, based on Linux (not sure which distro). It had a tab based desktop specially made for eeepc. Others could go to command line easily. It was pretty decent.

You will always have that developers itch to install the new OS. And also upgrading on Xandros was pain as it had its own packaging system, etc etc.

So the next step was to install any other distro of Linux. I landed up using crunchbanglinux. It's a true linux in the sense, it had proper desktop, controls etc. But I was not really happy with that. I always had problems getting on to Wifi which I never faced on Xandros. I survived few months but couldnt continue with it. Whats an eeepc with out connecting to wifi? So I decided to change. I must say I never tried to debug it. I am spoilt by the choice.
While installing crunchbang, I had thought about Jolicloud but it was still in alpha then. But then when recently I asked on twitter. Most of them suggested me to go with Jolicloud. So I did. The best part of Jolicloud was the download was available on bitorrent (I feel all the software should be downloadable and should be available through bitorrent. Why? thats another post.).
Even though I had problems while using default Jolicloud usb key creator. Their how to worked well for doing the same using diskimager. After that it was just reboot from USB and few clicks to install.

Once I completed the installation and rebooted. All I did was to register with Jolicloud online, to open more options. My most needed softwares are just a click.

The default desktop is again tab based, but feels much more polished than Xandros. Since Jolicloud is Ubuntu based, it would be difficult to install anything new.

By default everything worked well and I was online. I was able to install new apps by the click of the button. I still need to install some more apps like basic word processors etc which I think should have come by default. But I am very happy with overall UI and ease with which you can do anything. I am enjoying the Jolicloud. Looks like its going to stay on my netbook for sometime. You should try it too.