Day in, day out…

Jolicloud, in their own words, is a cool new OS. It is mainly targeted towards netbooks and other small laptop devices. It is currently in an invitation only private alpha. You can get an invite by registering on their website. I was lucky enough to get an invite last week.

I spent almost entire last week, in trying to install it on my Sony VAIO VGN-T140P laptop. It is a small laptop, so I thought Jolicloud would be a good option to try. However, the laptop BIOS does not support booting from a USB drive. And Jolicloud only provides a .img file that can go on a USB drive.

During the past week, I tried various ways to convert the .img file into a good .iso file that I can burn onto a CD and boot from there – sadly to no avail. Among the many things I tried were ccd2iso, nrg2iso, mkisofs, plain renaming of the .img file to a .iso file. Nothing generated a CD that I could boot from. All I had was a full set of 12 bad-CD coasters!

Last night, I found another free product that made me say WOW! aloud! During some intense googling, I came across this thing called PLoP Bootmanager. It claimed to do exactly what I wanted – boot from USB without the support from BIOS! I downloaded it and put it on a CD. With the Jolicloud USB drive in the USB port and PLoP Bootmanager CD in the CD drive, I restarted this laptop – it worked! PLoP Bootmanager came up, and showed me an option to boot from USB! I selected it and woo hoo! Jolicloud was booting!

I’ve installed Jolicloud on this laptop since, and am liking it. My laptop is not one of the supported devices, so I am sure there will be problems, but none so far. In fact, I am posting this from Google Chrome installed via Jolicloud Applications.

There are a few software titles that I swear by and always keep a copy handy – SuperGrubDisk, GParted, Ubuntu on a USB drive – to name a few. From today, I am keeping PLoP Bootmanager CD in that bag of goodies too! Kudos and many thanks to PLoP devs!