Head in the clouds!

I keep hearing about Cloud computing, and I am not sure if I fully understand its difference from general websites. The concept is interesting and I would be tempted to set up a “private cloud” at home to fool around with but don’t know where to begin.

So I was wondering if anybody here is programming cloud applications and if so, what is a good way to get started?

Also, if anybody is managing servers which are running cloud applications, what is a good way to set up a server, what kind of iron do you need and what pitfalls are there?

Thanks.

Check these links out,

amoebaOS WebTop Online Operating System - Home

Online Operating System definition of Online Operating System in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Cloud computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edit: The link I gave to AmoebaOS is not excepting registrations yet. Sorry about that. I was playing around with one awhile ago, about a year, that was nice but I can’t remember what that one was called.

I was thinking more of hosting my own server at home and running Cloud-apps myself (free ones).

Eventually, hopefully, even try coding some or coding some changes to existing ones.

I think there is an open source web office application available and while it looked rudimentary I think that might be a good place to start.

But I have no experience with cloud computing other than as a user.

Is openSUSE/Novell getting into Cloud computing? I know Ubuntu/Canonical and Red Hat are pushing hard into that user space.

I will add up to suse_amd64x2.
I used this application for some time. And it really works great.
Hope, you will find it useful.

http://eyeos.org/

Oh, now I see that it is downloadable. When I looked at cloud OSes I thought they were “run on their server” only, not “download and run on my server”.

Although I did spend some time fooling around with LTSP before.

Yes that is the one I forgot the name off. I wanted to check that out again anyways.

I must remember to bookmark it, write the url down on piece of paper and maybe tattoo that to the back of my hand so I don’t forget this time, lol.