EyeOS v OnEye - Your Computing Desktop in the Cloud

v 0.2

11 May 12

For those who like looking at the last page .. I now have a onEye setup working on my home network.  It was easy to set up (using a Debian Apache webserver in Virtualbox) and is pretty neat.

Now to what I was about to talk about.

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching an episode of "The Linux Action Show" where they were talking about personal alternatives to cloud computing services.  One of these was the EyeOS product.  I was interested and had a look.  Whilst I really wanted to like this, I had the impression that the people there had moved solidly towards their "Professional" product (good on them) and their "2.5" release was just missing things that I would have liked.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but the feeling was there.

A bit more research and I was starting to get a feeling for what was going on.  It seems that the EyeOS has forked at the 1.9 branch as a community project, renamed "onEye" and that many people prefer this branch to what has been produced to the 2.x series.  I have the feeling that the 2.x series would appeal to businesses, whereas the 1.9 series is more for the community.  The thing that really got me interested in looking at onEye rather than EyeOS was an evaluation which suggested that installation was less than ideal in the EyeOS implementation, and that the 2.x series was incompatible to many add-on applications that had been developed.

So what is it about all this that you should be interested about?  Effectively, when you log on to onEye / EyeOS, you are logging on to a computer desktop in the cloud.  Think Dropbox with a desktop and applications.  They have a sync applicaton along with some standard apps that are supplemented by a whole swag of others.  There is even a web browser in the standard setup.  Now why would you want a web browser within a web browser?  Well for a start, all browsing traces are left in the cloud.

Whilst reaction time for this desktop over the Internet is entirely dependent upon your connection speed, on a home network it is quite snappy and could be really useful for organising the sometimes chaotic things that happen on different computers at home - particularly in centralising backups of files we don't want to use.  (of course .. ownCloud is a contender for that as well).


Later ....