Moblin 2 First Impressions

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."

Comments

Bicycles what?

[Bodrius]

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.

Uh? Can we moderate the story itself as Off-Topic?

Re:Bicycles what?

[rolfwind]

You obviously don't understand the nuance of the story's analogy. Well-intentioned liberals often want to release bicycles in the wild so that the bike population breeds and grows over time; it's a well-known fact that bicycles don't breed in captitivity. However, bikes will start breeding too fast, and before you know it they'll start having more and more encounters with humans to catastrophic effect - in the denser areas of bicycle territory, you'll even see people get so desperate as to try to ride them, in a manner similiar to a horse, in order to tame them. This is obviously the law of unintended consequences.

Compare this to Linux. Right now, it's slow to wake up. Well-intentioned liberals see this lethargy as another sign of Linux captivity. They also want to see the population of linux grow. So, they come up with the bright idea to make linux less lethargic: if they wake up faster it means they'll have more energy. If they have more energy, linuxes will breed more often. Thus, it seems to the liberal, that fast boot up is desirable as to achieve this similiar end goal.

But the law of unintended consequences strike again! Many linuxes are in family homes, and their owners don't want to them to breed more. There'd be all types of trouble: imagine if the linux was at home and all it could breed with in its harmonal state was a Windows? Remember the Lindows travesty of years past?

Re:Bicycles what?

[ciaohound]

Many municipalities require you to have your pets neutered. Check your local ordinances to see if that includes penguins.

Re:Bicycles what?

[CRCulver]

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.

OpenedHand

[camcorder]

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.

Yeah, I see their point

[Chris Mattern]

Being able to boot quickly really, really sucks. It's so much better when you have to wait 10 minutes for your box to boot.

Wait, what?

Is this whole article a troll?

[PCM2]

I'm ... confused. From the article:

fast-boot Linux is probably doing more to harm than help the cause.

Yeah, because I and everyone I know hates nothing more than being able to boot quickly.

almost anything would be an improvement over Network Manager.

What?? Personally, I prefer Network Manager to Vista's networking UI any day.

In fairness, Network Manager has actually done an amazing job

Oh, never mind then.

Yet, what really won me over, in playing around with the Moblin 2 alpha, was the insanely fast boots.

Wait, are you trying to help or harm the cause?

Fast boots could be a true advance in the history of computing.

Oh, I don't know. My Apple ][ booted into the Basic ROM quickly enough.

Having two OSes, one fast-booting and one slow-booting, is a horrible kludge. It's like a car with two steering wheels, one only for parking.

Actually it sounds more like having two cars, one that's moving fast and one that's moving slow. But these car analogies always confuse me.

I think Microsoft may have to really re-think a few things if they are going to compete on boot time with the Linux distros of tomorrow.

You might be right...

I don't know how fast Windows 7 is booting

Oh, never mind then.

I have a feeling that those declaring it's "mission accomplished" for Windows on netbooks may be getting ahead of themselves just a bit.

In fact, you could even say they're doing more to harm the cause than help it ... oh I give up.

Re:Is this whole article a troll?

[JustinOpinion]

fast-boot Linux is probably doing more to harm than help the cause.

Yeah, because I and everyone I know hates nothing more than being able to boot quickly.

I think what the author was trying to say was something like: "The fast-booting versions of Linux are all stripped-down toy systems, thereby giving people the impression that Linux is an immature and feature-limited OS. Thus even though fast-booting Linux is exposing people to Linux, it is doing more harm than good to the overall image/reputation of Linux."

The wording is confusing, and the point being made (if I understand it correctly) isn't much better.

Re:Is this whole article a troll?

[im_thatoneguy]

Having two OSes, one fast-booting and one slow-booting, is a horrible kludge. It's like a car with two steering wheels, one only for parking.

Actually it sounds more like having two cars, one that's moving fast and one that's moving slow.

The problem the author is incompetantly attempting to define is that the fast booting Linux is often feature limited and that you must reboot into a real linux in order to use real applications.

It would be like having to pull off to the side of the road shut off the engine, flip a switch to Engine B and then start back up again in order to drive above 40mph in a hybrid. A sacrifice some are willing to make no doubt but like first generation electric cars give the user a bad taste in their mouth and misrepresents the potential of the system.

My experiences

[HRbnjR]

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?

Fuck, the 90-talists are here.

[eddy]

Oh, crap. I now get to read articles on computing technology which were written by people who aren't even aware that, once upon a not-so-distant time, you could turn on your computer and be greeted with a cool blue-on-blue READY.-prompt within a second.

I'm ancient, credz nuked :-(

On the upside, I did get a cool new .sig:

--
"Fast boots could be a true advance in the history of computing."
-- Henry Kingman, 2009-01-28

Re:Fuck, the 90-talists are here.

[Talisman]

"Fast boots could be a true advance in the history of computing."

-- Henry Kingman, 2009-01-28

Not to mention footwear.

My experience

[erikina]

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

Re:My experience

[erikina]

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