JeOS, Mamona, Online Desktops and CBI

This is a look at some very young projects that are not ready for prime time. It is interesting to see what's coming down the road and there are some preview releases for developers to play with.

First up is JeOS, a project recently announced by the Ubuntu team. JeOS, pronounced "juice" stands for Just Enough Operating System. It is intended to be an efficient variant of Ubuntu configured specifically for virtual appliances. The JeOS 7.10 CD image for x86 systems is available for download. The source code is in Launchpad, here. There is an ongoing discussion in Ubuntu forums which starts to get interesting around here.

Next up is Mamona, an embedded Linux distribution for ARM EABI. The main goal of the Mamona Project, according to this announcement, is to offer a completely open source alternative/experimental SDK package and flash image generation process for the Maemo Platform using only free and open source components. Mamona 0.1 currently runs on the Nokia Internet Tablet (N800 or N810), or it can be used as a SDK in a PC running over qemu.

The GNOME Online Desktop is a concept that moves more of your desktop online, so you can move to different computers and still have your familiar desktop. There is a tour in Red Hat Magazine of the pre-alpha demo release included in Fedora 8. If you travel or find yourself using different machines on a regular basis, the Online Desktop should simplify your life.

Last on this tour is Fedora's announcement the availability of CBI enabled packages for Fedora 8. CBI stands for the Cooperative Bug Isolation Project and it's not a new project, but it's worth a mention anyway. CBI is an ongoing effort to track down software bugs. CBI enabled versions of Evolution, The GIMP, GNOME Panel, Gnumeric, Nautilus, Pidgin, Rhythmbox, and SPIM are available for download for Fedora 8 and earlier versions of Fedora. These special versions of the applications monitor their own behavior while they run and send back information on how things should work (when they work properly) or on how things can go wrong. Privacy is important to CBI. They are looking for patterns in the data and will not collect any data without your permission. The more people who participate the more data they can collect and the more bugs can ultimately be squashed. This snapshot page shows graphs of recent findings.

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Someone should warn the guys at the 'Mamona' project that 'Mamona' means 'Very Large Breast'
in portuguese... :-D

Warn??? You of course means congratulate them with choosing a very nice name :D

Actually, in Portuguese, 'mamona' is the castor oil seed. We can use 'mamona' in the sense of
big 'mama' (=breast), but it's not common. At least not in pt_BR. ;-)

 So... it's named after a laxative? I'm not convinced that's such a good 
idea either.

Well, I am sure no Portuguese would ever use the word "peitão" to the same thing. Also, don't
believe any Portuguese would ever associate "mamona" with castor oil (twisted minds aside).

Maybe it's a case of Brasilian Portuguese versus European Portuguese, 
then.

In Brasil, a woman's breasts are called "peitos" instead of "mamas" [*]; 
so, "peitão"/"peitões" = "big breast(s)". How do you call the castor oil 
seed in Portugal? Notice that I didn't see any mamona trees when I was to 
Évora and Lisboa, and they used grow quite wild here in Belo Horizonte 
when I was a kid (you can still find it here, growing in vacant lots -- if 
you are so lucky as to come across a vacant lot nowadays).

[*] "mama" is still used, but usually only in medicine jargon ("câncer de 
mama" == "breast cancer"), so the augmented form "mamona" would not be 
used at all ;-)

Yes, it's just a cultural difference. "Mama" and "peito" are the same, but the latter is a bit
more respectful. Both words are in common use.

"Peitão" is not used at all (I can't even find it on a portuguese dictionary), and while
"mamona" can be found on the dictionary to mean the castor oil seed, it's not used by the
common people, so anyone (not a botanic) would only associate the word as slang for "big tit".

Sorry, but I will never store my most personal email on Google or something similar.  No
matter how good the security they promise.  So if the "online desktop" means abandoning all
local store in favour of some web company, I'll have to pass.

I could mean providing the _server_ component too, though, so you can install it on your own
server.  That I would find much more interesting.