For those who are sick of using Windows XP on their netbook and wanted to try out a netbook-efficient and more user friendly OS, then Jolicloud could well be the one heading to your netbook.

Jolicloud is a new Linux distro based on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but specifically optimized for netbook devices. What make it stands out from the rest is its Web services that delivers a whole new Web-centric experience to its users (we will discuss more on that later).

Jolicloud is currently at closed alpha testing stage and only offer download on an invitation basis. The download is a LiveCD installer of around 600MB, distributed in iso format. You will have to use a USB creator software to mount the iso file on a USB drive before you can use it to install on a netbook.

What do you get when you put a stable operating system, an innovative desktop manager and plenty of eye candies together? You get nothing short of a beautiful and functional OS.

Elive is a Debian-based Linux distro, customized with Enlightenment e17 desktop manager. It is designed with the aim of providing a stable, fully functional and beautiful operating system that can run with minimal hardware requirement.

The current stable version is based on Debian-etch while the version that is under development is based on the recently released Lenny. Knowing the stability and versatility of Debian and the elegant and simplicity of Enlightenment, there are little things that Elive can go wrong.