Aug

Take your desktop to the cloud with eyeOS

by Dmitri Popov

Why settle for different web-based applications when you can have a full-blown cloud-based desktop, offering a complete solution for daily computing? If a personal cloud desktop appeals to you, then eyeOS is exactly what you need…

To administrate your eyeOS installation, log into the system as root, right-click on the Desktop and select the Preferences item. In addition to the familiar groups like Personal and Look & Feel, the Preferences panel contains the Administration group where you can tweak the system settings.

For example, the Manage Users section lets you add new users as well as edit the existing ones. In the SMTP section you can configure server settings for outgoing mail, while you can configure various system settings like user quota and permissions in the System section.

The described 1.x version of eyeOS is a mature solution ready for production use, but if you want to take a sneak peek at what eyeOS’s developers are working on, you might want to give eyeOS 2.x a try. While you can install eyeOS 2.x on your own server, testing a hosted version of the software makes more sense. The eyeOS project maintains an eyeOS 2.x installation and you can easily take it for a spin by creating a user account.

As soon as you log into eyeOS 2.x, you’ll notice that this version sports a few radical changes. The entire environment has been redesigned from the ground up and it features a streamlined interface with the shortcuts bar at the bottom which provides quick access to key productivity applications such as an mail client, a file manager, a calendar and a word processor.

All bundled applications have been thoroughly reworked. This is especially true for eyeDocs which now sports a new interface, so the application looks more like a conventional desktop word processor. eyeDocs now supports collaborative editing, where several eyeOS users can edit the same document simultaneously. The new version of eyeOS also makes it easier to manage users and groups.

Using the People menu in the top bar, you can quickly search for other eyeOS users and add them as your contacts. The Group menu lets you create groups and populate them with users. Here you can also search and join existing eyeOS groups. eyeOS 2.x is obviously still a work in progress, but even in its current form it shows a lot of promise.

To read more tutorials from Linux User & Developer click here, or follow the link to see what else features in issue 90 of the magazine…