Raza’s Weblog

A free operating system that runs within your browser ! November 7, 2007

Sometimes i cant help but be amazed at the rate at which technology is advancing and touching our daily lives . Things like space travel , instant communication anywhere on the planet , the latest gizmos which were once the forte of science fiction writers have now become common place.

As Arthur Clarke the famous science-fiction author once remarked : “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic “.

Microsoft introduced the desktop to the world , as part of its hallmark Windows operating system . It also delivered a great deal of world class software in the form of a word processor , a spreadsheet package , a presentation manager etc , as part of its Office suite of programs and bet on the desktop being the future.However these applications need to be installed on the computer , which causes problems like me losing my data if my computer crashes. Also, i have to carry my data on media like a pendrive or a CD/DVD or upload it to some place on the web if i need to access the same data anywhere else.

However , Google came by and started delivering applications like a word processor and a spreadsheet package over the web,so now any person having an internet connection could use a wordprocessor and a spreadsheet package over the web (check out Google Docs if you havent heard of this yet) without ever having to install anything on his computer. The files could be accessed anytime, anywhere by the user without the user ever having to install a single piece of software on his computer.

With this trend of web based applications going on i was wondering when will we have an entire operating system available online . And my questions were answered when I recently came across something similar, an operating system that I can use just by using a normal Internet browser !

Sounds too good to be true ? . Well, its called eyeOS and below are a couple of screenshots :

As the eyeOS website says “eyeOS is an open source platform designed to hold a wide variety of Web Applications over it“

It has a full suite of applications bundled, some for private use, like the file manager, a word processor, a music player, calendar, notepad or contacts manager, almost anything that you would expect of an operating system . There are also some groupware applications, such as a group manager, a file sharing application, a group board and many more.

All you need to do is to login into your eyeOS operating system (what they call the eyeOS server) with a normal Internet Browser, and access your personal desktop, with your applications, documents, music, movies… just like you left it last time !

However,the goal of the eyeOS project is not to have an Operating System within an Operating System or a browser inside a browser, but it is about removing compatibility issues between applications and operating systems.

So, you can now create and save that important document of yours on eyeOS and later even if your machine crashes , you dont lose any data. Just get on to any system that has internet acess, login to your online operating system , and voila !, you have your file there just as you had saved it last time.

Also, if you use Windows and your friend uses Linux and both of youll are working on a common project, youll can use eyeOS which will let both of youll enjoy the same applications with the same open formats, so that youll can forget the usual compatibility problems between Office suites or traditional operating systems .

Now thats what i call true interoperability ! 🙂 . Check out eyeOS for yourself at http://www.eyeos.org.

With an operating system now becoming an application that can be used off the web , i wonder whether in the future we will need any operating system being installed on a computer at all . Maybe a time will come when hard disks will become obsolete because we wont need to save anything on our machines . As soon as I turn on my computer i would be connected to the Internet, and the operating system would be downloaded to my computer just like a normal webpage. All my applications , files would be saved online and will be accessible by me anytime anywhere !.

Well i think its still a distant dream but a dream worth dreaming , because after all isnt dreaming mans greatest ability ?….Ask, Harry Potter ! 🙂