Web based OS (operating system).

Handhelds are really nice, but you get away from the traditional desktop we are all familiar with.  Some people have coined the icon based tablet interfaces as being made by Fisher-Price (a toy manufacturer).  Also too, people are wanting to lower the system requirements for computers being used primarily as terminals. One way to do that is to only have the basic operating system on the machine with just the browser as a single application. How useful is that?  You can use a web server to dole out applications as I  indicated in a previous article.


You now have operating systems that work from the web. You can push out desktop operating systems  based on the traditional commercial software, but that gets into to some real heavy use. That requires a lot of heavy lifting (i.e. system resources). Now people are trending towards native web based operating systems that can be doled out with just a web server. Traditional virtual machine servers become less a necessity.

Went to Sourceforge.net to look at candidates. By the way, you are expected to log now to access their site. Fortunately I already had a login.  After logging in, randomly chose three web based desktops that can be run from the web to be featured. Eyeos, I have talked about before. but it does not hurt to mention it again, The two others are eXastum and w3OS. Wanted to see how it displayed both on a desktop and on a handheld.

EyeOS is discussed in more detail at: http://www.instructables.com/id/eyeOS/. Server install instructions included.  I have been using the free version for a while and I really like the fact I can prepare spreadsheets, office type documents, and even presentations. Pretty snazzy for something that does not have to be installed on your personal computer. Like all the following software can easily be used from a tablet. EyeOS seemed to scale well to the table and to the desktop.

EXastum is pretty much still beta and not for a production platform.Found it hard to use on the tablet, but then I did not examine all the possible settings. One advantage of eXastum is that it does not use Adobe Flash or Java. It is mostly HTML5. All you have to do to use the software is just point to where is is located and boom your up and running. Perfect for an alternative for a whole OS such as Ubuntu. Nothing to root or take up too much space. eXastum did work well on the desktop. To install it on a server all you have to do is copy the files to it's own web directory and set the appropriate permissions. Will want to see what additions are made to eXastum. Certainly there will be challengers that will also use HTML5.

W3OS looks real interesting. They have a standalone version including the web server primarily for Microsoft based machines and then they seem to have a tradtitional version for web servers. Did not have time yet to install it to give a review. In fact the picture is from their own archive and not my system. Update: I looked at the instructions for installation and they are a problem. Had to read the documentation several times to set the gist of it, Also too the install page came up in French. Not good.  Maybe the install will fix that.


Note: I would like to thank the author of eXatum for commenting on the article.