Notably, the first time I’ve actually dared use sed for anything remotely system-critical – and I did have a little help from teh internets. Practicing with sed and grep (essentially, practicing arbitrary regexp usage) is my early New Year’s Resolution on the Linux side of life – I’m at a stage where if I want to get “better” at Linux, this is the one thing that’s really going to make a big difference to my commandline-foo.

Anyways, aptitude is jumping around between around 5 and 10 hours of upgrading to be done… w00t. Shall have to see how many more times I need to invoke aptitude to get a functional system again!

Of course, what’s really interesting about gOS as an OS (rather than simply as a component of the now-famous $200 Wal-Mart system) is it’s total reliance on web applications, specifically Google ones. I was a bit disappointed, to be honest, with how little they’ve integrated these into the experience – the icons that relate to web rather than hard-drive based apps (all except for media player and config utils, IIRC) simply open a bog-standard Firefox window at that page, rather than integrating as if it were a desktop app. Anybody could do this – sure, it’d take a little tweaking in places, but for me, it’s far easier to have one FF window open right from the start of my session, with all the apps/pages I use the most in a bookmarks toolbar, and just go from there. Being Linux, all the other aspects of it could be fairly easily recreated by apt-get downloading the relevant things, so gOS is certainly not going to be replacing my Kubuntu partition any time soon. It’s a brilliant concept, and just right for a dirt-cheap PC bundle that should, hopefully, increase mainstream awareness of Linux in the US – but poorly executed.

One thing I will say for it – Firefox sure loads fast. Possibly just because it has no extensions – but I think it loads even faster than a clean install would on my machine. Anybody know what they’ve tweaked?