eyeos

A good place to start your discovery of Web-based operating system is eyeOS http://www.eyeos.org, which is free, open source and very easy to sign up for. There's no need to install anything to use eyeOS. Simply sign up with a user name and password to create an account, and from that point forward you have an operating system on the web, accesible from any browser. eyeOs creates space on its server to store your operating system settings and files you create.

eyeOS resembles contemporar desktop-bound operating systems. There's a work space area or desktop along with the icons on the left that represnts short cuts to applications , including a a Word processor and you will find yourself in a service able document creation tool, replete with toolbar buttons for most of the formatting tasks that a user require today.

Documents you save are stored on eyeOS's servers by default, so there's no local storage involved. You can, if you choose, download the files you create to your own PC and upload files to your eyeOS envoirment. The beauty of a Web-based envoirment, however, id that you can shut down your browser and thus your eyeOS operating system on one machine, launch a browser on other machine in another location, and then launch your eyeOS desktop again. eyeOS even remembers all the applications and documents you were last working on, so the work space you se is exactly the one you left of with.

A green button at the bottom middle of the screen contains shortcuts to system settings. applications and a few other commands, and you will see some impressive customization options ,including the ability to change the theme, or look , eyeOS to resemble Vista, Ubuntu, Gnome or other Operating systems. The one glaring omission from eyeOS is an email client.