Jolicloud on virtualbox

Continuing my search for a lightweight OS to be run on my old spare laptop I chanced upon jolicloud and requested for an invitation. Got the invitation right away and downloaded the iso image yesterday.
The initial impressions are good. The installation was fairly straight forward, much like any ubuntu install.
Have posted a few screen shots below.
Now I have two OSes that I want to try on the old laptop this weekend – jolicloud and goodOS.

I do like the new look of the desktop that jolicloud has and also the very nice and intutive interface to install new apps (see last image) makes is easier for people accustomed to other OSes to move seamlessly.

However, what I am not quite sure is how will jolicloud login behave when I connect to the jolicloud webservice from another machine. Since it seems to keep the data of my installed apps on their server.

jolicloud-image-1

jolicloud-image-1

jolicloud-image-3

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goodOS on virtualbox

In my search for a lightweight OS for a spare laptop which has fairly minimal resources to run a full OS. I tried installing goodOS on my virtualbox and am quite happy with the initial experience.

The process was fairly straight forward. Just downloaded the iso from http://gos1.losslessrecords.com/gos/gos-3.1-gadgets-20081205.iso. The download did take sometime though.

And used the iso to boot a new vm in virtualbox. Found it good. Will give it a try on the old laptop sometime next weekend. I might face some driver issues. Lets see.

Some screenshots below from running it in virtualbox.

goodOS1

goodOS2

Installing apps on Live Android

After playing around with the liveandroid instance on my Virtualbox VM, it was time to try out installing some apps.

Few basic things first:

1. For switching to the console mode / terminal screen press : Alt-F1
2. For switching back to the GUI mode from console mode press : Alt-F7

I read about how to install apps here.

Android apps are files ending with .apk. And all that is needed to install the app is to copy the *.apk file to the /system/app folder. Image-1 shows how my /system/app folder looks like after I have installed a few apps.

So the only task remains is downloading the apps and copying them to the /system/app folder. For downloading apps try any of the following:

1. Download the AndAppStore Client – and use this client to browse and install apps. I find this as the best way.
   1. Either wget http://download.funkyandroid.net/SoftwareDirectory-1_3_0.apk
   2. Or, click on http://andappstore.com/AndroidApplications/apps/125845!download
   3. Ensure that the SoftwareDirectory-1_3_0.apk is copied to the /system/app folder
   4. Switch back to the GUI view (Alt-F7) and go to the menu screen, and you can see the AndAppStore Client – Seen as Software Directory (See image-2)
2. You could also browse apps at http://www.cyrket.com/
   1. Download the apps directly from the browser
   2. The apk file is downloaded to /sdcard/download
   3. Switch to console mode (Press Alt-F1 )
   4. cp /sdcard/download/* /ststem/app/
   5. chown 1000:1000 /system/app
   6. Switch to the GUI mode (Press Alt-F7) – That is it, you should be able to see your app !

image-1

image-2

Live-Android 0.3 on Sun Virtualbox

I had read about the live-android which is a live cd version of the Google Android mobile platform, and decided to give it a try.

Downloaded the iso image from http://code.google.com/p/live-android/downloads/list.

Had to download the two files liveandroidv0.3.iso.001 and liveandroidv0.3.iso.002, created a single iso using cat:

cat liveandroidv0.3.iso.001 liveandroidv0.3.iso.002 > liveandroidv0.3.iso

Created a virtual machine using virtualbox and there we go.

Did not get a chance to install any apps. Will try that sometime later and see how it goes. If all works fine, I might install it on my old laptop which just has 256mb RAM.