Los Angeles based Good OS LLC have just released a preview the latest iteration of their web-centric Linux distribution, this time being a lightweight release based on Ubuntu 8.04 and the surprisingly full-featured yet lightweight LXDE window manager, which is based on OpenBox. The new version is known as Gadgets, after Google’s Gadgets, due to its tight integration with Google’s various web-based services, and the beta is available to download now.

In a very nice move, gOS Gadgets supports the running of Google Documents, Google Calendar, and GMail as if they were desktop apps using Mozilla’s Prism technology – although OpenOffice is also available for your offline office needs.

The latest version of gOS also comes with WINE, a system which allows Windows applications to be run within Linux without the need for an emulator or virtualisation technology such as VMWare. The version included is WINE’s milestone 1.0 release, the first non-beta release since the project’s inception 15 years ago.

As you can see from the screenshots, gOS isn’t just a functional, lightweight system. It also looks pretty swish too, which is an important consideration in these semi-transparent, drop shadow loving times of Windows Vista and OS X Leopard. That said, it is designed with the typically low processing power and RAM specifications of Netbooks, such as Asus’ hugely popular Eee, in mind, although it will happily scale up to run (very quickly indeed) on much more powerful systems.

You can download an ISO of gOS Gadgets beta here, however they are currently experiencing issues to to very high demand. I’ll be sharing my thoughts on this interesting new release in the coming days.

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