You can start imagining myself playing with that stuff in the next months, it deserves love from a new gtk+ engine

EDIT: Maybe not only today, eventually tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the day after the day after tomorrow and so on…

This blog post is the right place to discuss your dreams

Stay tuned

I’m in both Freenode (#murrine and #ubuntu-art) and Gimpnet (#gnome-art and #gnome-it), username… Cimi of course!

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter!

Become Fan and suggest to your Linux friends!

But, my time is precious and, as I am not payed to do it and the donations stopped , I can’t invest the same efforts I did in the past.

So, waiting better days, I decided with Kenneth from Ubuntu to open a page in the Ubuntu Wiki (later to be moved on live.gnome.org and on the official Murrine website), where themers could help writing a great documentation of this amazing (not because I am the author ) GTK+ engine.

Other major tasks before a new release is to improve RGBA support on few sides… I will definitely look into it in the future, when it will be possible!

If you want to support me in the development of the engine and new themes you could always sponsor me I am thinking about writing down a list of the donors, what do you think?

For Ubuntu Lucid the desktop team started working on a patch which enables RGBA colormap by default, and adds client-side window decorations capabilities as well.
That means transparency to your applications and much more

Murrine will try to follow this trend, maybe slowly because I’m busy with other things, but something will happen.

For the braves, here’s the link to the bug.

Of course, donations to Murrine are always welcome!

Jolicloud is not the first Linux distribution I have installed on my Samsung NC10… I’ve tested also Ubuntu Jaunty/Karmic, Fedora, Arch Linux and Moblin (latest snapshot).

Which is the technology behind Jolicloud?

Basically Jolicloud is a derivate of Ubuntu Netbook Remix with wide Prism usage across the desktop environment: the majority of “applications” you have seen in the screenshots are small packages which provide an independent Prism session on a specific website: for example, if you install the twitter application you will get a new icon inside your application list, that icon will start a new fullscreen Prism session for twitter.com.
Common desktop applications are also included, like Firefox or VLC, but it is highly focused on web services.

Installation

It is just like Ubuntu, nothing more/nothing less (you are in the Jolicloud desktop, but the installer is the same used by Ubuntu).

First Run

As said, the “core” is an Ubuntu Netbook Remix, so we firstly see an Usplash booting sequence (nice and simple theme)…

Followed by the GDM session (simple and nice theme too)…

After the login procedure the desktop environment starts. It’s a GNOME desktop with the Netbook Remix session: the custom panel on top shows the title of the current application in the middle, a list of the running application on its left and the status icons on its right. In the center of the screen Jolicloud asks to login on the website and then it opens the default screen you might have already seen (the dashboard shown in the screenshots is nothing more than a Prism session running http://my.jolicloud.com).

Jolicloud is now ready.

The home screen, dashboard, how do you call it

As said, the main screen is a Prism session (so a website, no Clutter, no Cairo, no Gtk+…) with useful links to your applications and your settings. It is great to see how it is simple to use, really: installing and removing applications is a matter of a click, browsing and viewing the catalog of applications is very easy. For everyone. I like it.

Running applications

The separated fullscreen Prism sessions work surprisingly well… In the reality you’re running a web browser, but they give you the feeling that they are just like normal applications: if you run gmail, twitter, facebook (etc etc) you have their icons in your taskbar and you switch between them like they were a real application.

It’s the web now the protagonist of your netbook because you are actually using each web 2.0 service as an individual application: something that has been imagined for years by almost every company (Microsoft too) realized in Jolicloud really well.

A desktop replacement?

This distribution is absolutely amazing to surf the web when you’re on a train, in the university, when you just want your social websites up and running, when you want to update all your services and work with your documents.
But just like Moblin, in my opinion it is not meant to replace your Ubuntu… it will be likely added to your grub in a small partition dedicated to your social virtual space. And that is a good thing… when you need you have a quick access to the web. Great!

Comparison with Moblin

They are two completely different projects, even if they share the same love for the web.
Moblin is like a smart interface for your netbook providing a mix of useful applications with incredible tecnologies behind (KMS, fastboot, Clutter…) optimized for your netbook, with Jolicloud the web becomes your operating system (it provides the applications) trough an efficent environment for your small laptop.
I’m sure they will live together on my hard disk soon