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Moblin 2 First Impressions

Posted by kdawson on from the fast-boot-coming-to-a-distro-near-you dept.

nerdyH notes a DesktopLinux.com first look at the alpha of Intel's Moblin 2 toolkit for Linux distributors to create distributions for netbooks and other Atom-based kit. "A lot of notebooks and even netbooks these days run Windows, but also offer a minimalist Linux environment that boots in seconds. Now, with the Intel-sponsored Moblin project's alpha release of Moblin 2 Monday, it looks like insanely fast boots will become a standard feature of full-featured Linux desktops, too. Some of the quick-booting environments out there are enough to give anyone a lasting hatred of Linux. Like those free bicycles that liberal, well-intentioned municipalities release into the wild from time to time, hoping to get drivers out of their cars, fast-boot Linux is probably doing more to harm than help the cause. But pretty soon, even full-featured Linux will boot in seconds. That's because Intel's built some mighty whizzy read-ahead boot technology into Moblin 2."

6 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. OpenedHand by camcorder · · Score: 4, Informative

    Maybe it's better to note that Intel recently acquired OpenedHand and OpenedHand developers joined Intel Open Source Labs in order to work on Moblin platform. This looks like the first fruit of this acquisition.

  2. Re:X windows by bitMonster · · Score: 3, Informative

    That should say C preprocessor, I believe.

  3. My experiences by HRbnjR · · Score: 4, Informative

    I tried to get Moblin working on my MID.

    I couldn't even get the installer to boot (kernel panic).

    I filed a bug ( http://bugzilla.moblin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197 ) which, despite being a critical issue, hasn't had so much as a peep out of a developer yet (after several months).

    And just three articles back ( http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/31/1859200 ) Slashdot is discussing the "Bloody Mess" that is the Intel Poulsbo driver, which it's worth noting, is provided as part of the Moblin project.

    I'm thinking Moblin may need quite some more polish, and that perhaps they may be a little under-staffed?

  4. My experience by erikina · · Score: 5, Informative
    I just have installed and tested the distro with my Acer Aspire One (a supported computer).

    (In dot format here is my experience)
    • Being only 264MB it was quick to download.
    • Transferring to USB was painless, why can't all distros be like this?
    • The "Boot and install" menu was broken. Had to use just the "boot" (and double click later to install)
    • Install was quick and easy
    • Little laptop takes 15 seconds to boot from grub. Which is about half the speed of Ubuntu/Fedora/OpenSUSE
    • New network manager worked very well
    • Limited software choices, but 98% of the stuff you need
    • No proprietary codecs, and not sure how to install (yet)
    • Devel version of firefox (which works really well)

    8/10 Best distro I've tested so far for my notebood

    1. Re:My experience by erikina · · Score: 4, Informative

      Oh, one other thing. When installing you need root password. It's "moblin". I spent 10 minutes trying to find out what it was.

  5. Re:Bicycles what? by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Informative

    I live in a Nordic welfare state where social programmes are much more generous than anything even the most liberal American lawmaker ever conceived of, and there isn't catastrophic leeching like you insist follows naturally. It turns out that even with generous unemployment benefits, most people actually like to have a job. Huge taxes on businesses haven't stopped Finland from becoming a globally competitive state that a major company like Nokia still wants to call home.