gPC - $199 C7 powered PC at Wal-Mart running gOS

In this day and age when each and everyone of us are to be affected by the adverse effects of global warming, it definitely makes sense to bring necessary changes to our lifestyles and make it more environmentally friendly. And a good way to take a positive step towards being more green is to conserve the power or energy you consume at home.

And talking about power consumption, did you know that an average desktop PC is a major source of power consumption ? And if you consider many households now a days owning more than one PC, it definitely pays to buy energy efficient computers; those which consume less power.

This is where gPC or "Green PC" comes into the picture. Everex's TC2502 gPC is the first mass-market sub $200 PC which comes installed with gOS which is a customized version of Ubuntu Linux running Enlightenment window manager. The specifications of gPC are quite modest but acceptable. The TC2502 is powered by 1.5GHz VIA C7-D processor, 512MB DDR2 RAM, 80GB IDE hard drive and a CDRW/DVD combo drive. Apart from that it also comes bundled with a keyboard, a mouse, speakers and microphone though no monitor. The gPC consumes modest power when compared to other desktop PCs running the same operating system which gives it the name Green PC.

Fig: Sub $200 Everex gPC

Fig: gPC contains a variant of the 17cm x 17cm Mini-ITX motherboard

Now gOS the OS powering the gPC is a unique OS. While I said it is a customized version of Ubuntu, the word 'customized' is an understatement. gOS highlights and encourages users to use web applications instead of the traditional software for their day to day computing tasks. Google applications have a heavy presence in the gOS such as the Google Docs, Gmail, Gtalk, Calendar, Maps, Youtube, Blogger and so on and they can be accessed right from the desktop with the click of a button (assuming you are connected to the net). So it can be safely said that gPC aka Green PC runs gOS aka Google OS.

Fig: gOS aka Google OS

But Google applications are not all that you will find in gOS, there is Facebook, Wikipedia, Skype and many more web applications. Of course you will also find traditional software like OpenOffice.org, Gimp and so on installed with the option of installing any software you want which will run in Ubuntu which makes it pretty exciting.

Fig: gPC also can be bought with 1 GB RAM and 80GB SATA Hard disk for $100 more.

At present the gPC is marketed exclusively by Wal-Mart and can be bought from here. Those of us who live outside America need not be despondent because the gOS has been made available as a free download by the team behind this customized Ubuntu Linux distribution - Think gOS.

I think this is a very bold but positive move to eventually shift all computing to the internet thus giving a strong push to the term "Network is the computer" and in the process giving new life to energy efficient devices thus perhaps saving tons of energy.