Given the explosive arrival of Linux into the consumer desktop market, I thought it’d be interesting to check out the operating system at the heart of the best selling Walmart Linux PC. Let me introduce you to gOS. It’s built on top of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, but in choosing the lesser known Enlightenment DR 17 window manager the developers have taken a different route towards delivering this new distribution.

Although E-17 is pre-alpha software, it seems to run pretty reliably and responsively on my old PIII Dell Latitude laptop. The good performance is likely testament to the designer’s desire to develop a window manager that could deliver eye candy, without sacrificing performance. Given the snappy response of E-17 on my PC, I imagine it runs exceptionally well on the Walmart PC (especially compared to Win XP or Vista Basic).

The desktop presents the user with a Mac OS X style dock containing links to various applications - and interestingly - several web services.

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