gOS

David Liu, founder and CEO of gOS

With the recent release of gOS 3 Beta, we thought it was prime time to take a closer look at the company responsible for creating the OS that powered the ill-fated Everex Cloudbook, and the gorgeous (and Mac OS X Leopard-inspired) gOS Space. We chewed the fat with David Liu, gOS founder and CEO, about the operating systems’ new features, potential competition from Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the push for consumer adoption, and the future of Linux on the desktop.

LAPTOP: When did gOS originally launch?
David Liu: We call it g-O-S, but a lot of people do call it “gOS” [rhymes with “loss”]. It publically launched on November 1st, 2007. That’s when we came out with the Walmart PC with our partner Everex. We had another partner called Sylvania that did a similar unit to the Cloudbook, and now we’re working with different manufacturers in Taiwan. A lot of it is still focused on netbooks and internet appliance type of products.

Does gOS have a set release schedule or do you release whenever you can add something new to the mix?
What we try to do is make something new every 3 to 4 months. Our focus is totally on the consumer. Traditionally, a Linux company has a server product line and the consumer side is a sort of way to brand it and point back to the server where they actually make their money. Our team is a little bit smaller and just focused on the consumer. Every 3 to 4 months, we try to do an update and look around during in-between times to see what’s a really good fit for the particular hardware that we’re looking at.

A lot of the software that’s preloaded on lots of the distributions was created a while ago and was originally meant for workstations and standard-size computers. As we get into non-workstations and into netbooks and Internet appliances, the software needs to change and adapt to make the experience more real. We try to release more often and try to pick the best applications to fit the hardware.

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After reading Jeff’s post on the new gOS Space 2.9, I was psyched to try and port it over to the CloudBook. The operating system looked sick (as in awesome, not physically ill) on his desktop. The transparent dock on the bottom made the whole screen look sleek and the celestial wallpaper gave the system a more futuristic aura.

I figured if any system needed a refreshed gOS, it was the CloudBook (which came running gOS Rocket). Therein lay my mission: become the Joan of Arc of the CloudBook and get gOS Space to run on the ailing system.

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