Novell and Intel Team Up For Moblin On Netbooks

ruphus13 writes "The Mobile and Netbook space already has several Open Source OS providers. Android has been making its way into netbooks, and Moblin, LiMo and Ubuntu are also alternatives for OSes on netbooks and mobile handhelds. Now, Novell has also joined the fray, but rather than porting openSuSE, they have teamed up with Intel to get OEMs to use Moblin for their mobile devices. From the article: 'With the other tools and benefits that Moblin offers OEMs and developers, it's really a rather smart approach that could potentially yield a better netbook experience (for developers and consumers), maximize development resources, and produce quality software in minimal time. I don't think Novell is eschewing SUSE, but in its current form, it's not as suited for netbooks as it is systems like the HP ProBooks. Paired with Moblin's netbook-centric bent and coming from a desktop/server market (rather than a true mobile device background), bringing a SUSE/Moblin system to netbooks has as much potential (if not more) for success as an Android adaptation does.'"

Comments

What's up with SUSE?

[ultrabot]

It's interesting to follow Novell's moves regarding SUSE; first, they lay off lots of SUSE developers, now they are just "skipping" it in favor of Moblin. I'd be surprised if there was no hard feelings regarding the decision among the SUSE team.

Re:What's up with SUSE?

[ultrabot]

Nevermind my earlier comment - Infoworld article states:

Novell began assigning its Linux developers to work on Moblin several months ago

So basically, we will be seeing some SUSE-ization of Moblin. Which is good, because IIRC Moblin has pretty immature/shallow userspace so far.

Re:Moblin?

[mc1138]

In today's world, security is becoming ever more important. With reports of an all Mac bot net, or iZombie network, security even on linux variants becomes ever more necessary. Enter, Moblin, armed with both spear and the tenacity to attack small blond haired boys, you're about to enter a new realm of computing experience.

Re:Great a notebook with a broken package manager

[Anonymous Coward]

Although opensuse is a very nice distro it still suffers from package manager issues (in 11.1) they should change to apt and they would have a rocking distro...

apt blah blah. rpm sucks. dependency hell....blah blah.

rpm based distros today have pretty good package managers which have nothing to envy apt.

openSUSE has a neat package manager since 11.0. Issues were in 10.1 times, 3 years ago. Today you have a neat zypper, YaST using the same engine, PackageKit integration, etc.

Re:Great a notebook with a broken package manager

[EsbenMoseHansen]

openSUSE has a neat package manager since 11.0. Issues were in 10.1 times, 3 years ago. Today you have a neat zypper, YaST using the same engine, PackageKit integration, etc.

Out of curiosity, does that mean that stuff like

• unused packages removal - ie, if a a package is only installed as a dependency, and if no package which depend on it are still installed, the package can be automatically removed.
• suggested packages, ie., packages has a list of packages which enhances the package in quesiton.
• recommended packages, ie, packages which are not strictly required but should normally be installed with a package.
• support for packages deprecating and/or providing other packages
• support for running configuration utilities and such during installation

Just curious, the comparisons chart I have found are obviously out of date.

Re:Great a notebook with a broken package manager

[crush]

Most of the tasks which you list below can be handled by Fedora-originated, distro-agnostic tools such as YUM or PackageKit. (Well, YUM is only distro-agnostic to the extent that it must be an RPM-based distro).

* unused packages removal - ie, if a a package is only installed as a dependency, and if no package which depend on it are still installed, the package can be automatically removed.

This is handled in Fedora with the use of the yum extension package-cleanup and using one of the "leaf-node" options.

* suggested packages, ie., packages has a list of packages which enhances the package in quesiton.

PackageKit does this in recent versions of Fedora, see this link for information on Fedora 11 font and mime-type installation.

* recommended packages, ie, packages which are not strictly required but should normally be installed with a package.

Not sure about this, seems like the previous point?

* support for packages deprecating and/or providing other packages

Obsoletes: is a feature of RPM since way-back

* support for running configuration utilities and such during installation

Again, since way back whenever it has been possible to run scriptlets in RPM specfiles.

Are you kidding? Of course it's bad news for SuSE

[hwyhobo]

InfoWorld wonders if the collaboration efforts aren't a bad omen for Novell's SUSE Linux

Every time Novell gets involved with UNIX, it spells doom for the latter. I worked for Novell when it purchased USL and UNIX. We lamented the faith that inevitably had to befall UNIX because we knew how UNIX-averse and arrogant the upper echelons were. There were people back then in charge of Novell who actually believed they would build competitive Internet run on IPX - I swear I am not joking.

I don't believe much has changed. To a lot of those MBA types all those technologies are just meangless abbreviations and acronyms, and as long as they can rearrange letters on the table and get something that looks catchy to some marketing drone, they think they've got a winner.