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First Moblin V2 Netbook Launches
nerdyH writes "The first netbook preinstalled with Moblin v2 for Netbooks will launch next week, possibly at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, or else the Linux Foundation's LinuxCon in Portland. Then, within the next couple of weeks, the Moblin Project will release the first stable release of the Moblin v2 Linux distribution, which began beta testing in May."
Instead of a distro, I'd rather see the Moblin concepts applied as a shell in Gnome and/or a containment in KDE 4. This is much nicer than the netbook containment concept I see the KDE 4 guys currently kicking around. However, as a complete distro, it suddenly requires package maintainers and much more support overhead. In that regard, Moblin seems to fall short.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I read the article (I know that's a suprise to many) but didn't see it saying exactly *who* is going to be releasing this next week. If they don't know at this point, it would be safe to bet that someone next week may *announce* a release but there's no way we'll actually see a release.
Also, I don't know if I see a benefit in Moblin. It is so far removed from what we're used to after some twenty years of Mac and Windows and X guis.
I tried it back in may and thought it intriguing but very different.
http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/2009/20090526_moblin_browser.jpg
http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/2009/20090526_moblin_desktop.jpg
Also - do they have flash plugins for the moblin browser? Will people want to use Firefox? Wine?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Moblin? What is it - a combination of "goblin" and a "mob"? No matter how I read it, the associations I get are just very negative. Can't sell a product with a name like that.
One of the main things I want in a netbook is *fast* boot/suspend/resume. I want to pop it open and use it right now, like a handheld consumer device. Same goes for opening the basic apps. Think iphone, it's ready *now* when you want it, Safari opens fast. You wouldn't want this as your office desktop, but you really do want this as your on-the-go experience.
IF Moblin delivers this where others have failed, all hail Moblin. I'll even run it on my older laptop -- one with a 1.3GHz Celeron and 256MB of RAM that is too painfully slow to use with GNOME. It's OK as a desktop where you don't need to boot or re-start apps often, but as a portable it's not acceptable to wait and wait and wait...
Now can I get that on a snapdragon 1.5GHz please?
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
So Intel developed Atom as an x86 processor because so much software runs on x86 and not, say, ARM.
Then Intel spends money developing a Linux OS for netbooks that's open source.
ARM just got free software from Intel and makes superior processors.
Just a waste of time, this moblin thing.
Correct, because everyone is just like you.
I looked at moblin a while ago and thought the design better suited for touch screens rather than keyboard/mouse inputs.
Wonderful! It's the year of the linux netbook ... long live 2007 and the eee 701!.
Euh, I mean, 2009! With Moblin!
Propaganda 101: exaggerate and ascribe claims to those you disagree with so that you can easily knock them down. Ex. Death Panels.
*If* you prefer Linux and *if* you have a netbook, this is nice news. If not, then what's it matter? There is no "the year of Linux", and until X11 is either repaired or replaced, there never will be. That doesn't mean every positive Linux story is rubbish just because it won't cause the world to switch en masse over to Linux.
I tried Moblin on an Intel Aspire One D250 and on an Asus 701 4G with 1GB RAM upg. recently and it was a superfail. Just visiting the built-in applications would cause crashes and you'd have to reboot before they would work again. It's amazing how intel has managed to make the stuff horribly reliable on their own chips, when the systems it's based on work just fine on these machines.
If they can bring Moblin around to the point where it doesn't crap all over itself constantly I'm interested. It has a really nice interface. It's ungodly slow on intel graphics chips, though...
With that said, I'm running Windows 7 Enterprise on my lt3103u and could not be happier, except for compatibility problems. I hope Microsoft can iron them out. Dungeon Siege doesn't work, that's pretty sad considering it's a Microsoft-distributed game. I know that if I were Microsoft I would demand that games I will distribute call my APIs properly so that they will work on the next edition of my OS. Civilization 2 Gold doesn't work either, but at least it doesn't require a 3D accelerator and so I may be able to play it in XP Mode. If I can't, then the value of running Windows is diminished; backwards compatibility is a loss, so I might as well run Linux on the metal and run Windows inside of VirtualBox or VMware where I will have at least cursory 3D support.
If I do end up back on Linux, though, it'll be Ubuntu Karmic x64, which I know supports all but my wifi without so much as a repo change (drivers are available in backports or something.) It's not going to be moblin, which Intel has taken some pains to alter to not work well on anything but their chips. It's unfortunate that, in their incompetence, they made it not work well on theirs either. Oh yeah, the interface doesn't fit on the screen of my EEE 701 either. You'd think that an OS for netbooks would work on small screens. Maybe that's fixed now, though. I know they don't actually care about you if you don't have an Atom chip, which just makes me more miffed at Intel... Since I put XP back on the Atom-based system I've got, and gave it to my Lady to replace her stupid failing Dell Vostro 1500. Hmm, that's a Centrino system, too... IntelFAIL
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've got Fedora on my laptop. It probably boots about as fast as windows without crapware would, which isn't terribly quick ~1 minute. But it comes back from suspend like lightning and uses virtually no power on suspend.
I really like it for homework, because I can look something up quick, then suspend, work for another hour, repeat. I rarely run low on battery that way. I can't really give a time (like 4-5 hours) because each time is a little bit different with my usage, but there is more of a lag in me figuring out what to type in google than there is in it coming back from suspend.
Failure formatting five FAQs of financial facts.
Euh, I mean, 2009! With Moblin!
"It is the YEAR OF THE PENGUIN! It is finally here! TUX, ARISE!"
Propaganda 101: exaggerate and ascribe claims to those you disagree with so that you can easily knock them down. Ex. Death Panels.
What does this have to do with the parent?
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
Oh great. Another ignorant X basher. What do you think is wrong with X 11.7.4, picking a recent version for example? And those problems, are they really wrong with X, or some flaws in the specific xorg reference implementation?
I have yet to meet an X basher who really understands it (and it's flaws) properly. Or the benefits and flaws of other windowing systems for that matter.
And, most of the people who actually act on the "throw it away" premise really seem to insist on ditching everything that X got right, and often failing to fix what was wrong. Take, eg gnome and it's wretched configuration database, compared to xrdb. It is quite clear that none of the gnome devs have machines with an NFS shared home directory, a hetrogeneous environment or much need for remote X at all. If they did, they would have paid far more attention to what xrdb got right, and fixed the real flaws rather than reimplementing the windows registry of all things.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Propaganda 101: exaggerate and ascribe claims to those you disagree with so that you can easily knock them down. Ex. Death Panels.
What does this have to do with the parent?
Because you tried to associate this story with being yet another "year of Linux" article.
Oh great. Another ignorant X basher. What do you think is wrong with X 11.7.4, picking a recent version for example? And those problems, are they really wrong with X, or some flaws in the specific xorg reference implementation?
When I mentioned X11, I was referring both to the standard itself, and the present implementation (including extant window managers and desktop environments).
Architecturally, it's a mess. You have the core portion, which is little more than a network transparent way of drawing rectangles, moving a cursor around and typing. On top of that, all the extensions, like Xinerama, and the various and incompatible acceleration/3d modules. Next is the slew of various and disparate libraries for doing *standard* things like drawing shapes and buttons. And finally, the various window managers and desktop environments do their best (which is pretty damned awful) to mix it all together into something remotely resembling a user interface.
I have yet to meet an X basher who really understands it (and it's flaws) properly. Or the benefits and flaws of other windowing systems for that matter.
I think this may be because you are looking at X11 with blinders on. If you look at just the protocol itself, I can see why someone might think there's nothing wrong with it, because the overwhelming majority of its flaws are further down the chain. Sound, 3D, window compositing, UI, desktop environment, multimedia support, all those things are on top of X11, so they might seem like separate problems, but because none of these are inherent to X11, they have to be bolted on. The two main graphical environments, Windows and Mac OS X, have a coherent and integrated set of technologies, and this is what X11 sorely lacks.
And, most of the people who actually act on the "throw it away" premise really seem to insist on ditching everything that X got right, and often failing to fix what was wrong.
X got *nothing* right. The only thing even remotely positive about X is that you can display your programs on a remote display without needing to do anything special, and it does such a piss poor job of it that unless you want to mix windows from various machines (which *is* pretty cool, however), you're generally better off just running VNC.
Take, eg gnome and it's wretched configuration database, compared to xrdb. It is quite clear that none of the gnome devs have machines with an NFS shared home directory, a hetrogeneous environment or much need for remote X at all.
NFS is another crap protocol. But that's a side issue, except for the similarity in that the open source/unix crowd really needs to work on replacing the foundations of their system (the Linux kernel, the POSIX environment and the GNU utilities are just about the only things *right* about Linux). NFS is so awful, it's better to just run SAMBA in most cases.
But back to X11. It needs to be scrapped, but it's got so much inertia that all of the various projects that have aimed to replace it have gained little traction.
If they did, they would have paid far more attention to what xrdb got right, and fixed the real flaws rather than reimplementing the windows registry of all things.
I agree. Gnome's two biggest mistakes are trying to emulate classic Mac OS too closely, and their configuration system.
I don't know if Moblin will succeed or not, and I suspect many variables will play into that but am I the only one that sees their attempt at different as a rare but positive move? So far from the desktop-Linux world we've seen distros patch, compile and configure all the same pieces of open source software. This gives us a vary organic and grass-rootsy environment, and for familiarity and compatibility that's really great. But on the same note there's very little to differentiate one desktop distribution from another and I've typically made my decisions based on package manager and the size of the user base (popular distros/ good community support).
On the server I really think that all the above is important, and I'm in not hurry to see any of that change. However on the desktop all these marginally different distributions provide very little compelling reason to use one over the other and honestly without the branding (or having installed it myself) I'd be hard pressed to tell you which distribution I might be using at any given instance.
In the cases of commercial distributions aiming at the desktop, like Ubuntu or Mandriva I really see this a failure build on the advantages made available by open source software. Canonical could risk designing an operating system based on this wealth open source software, but instead they choose to focus on packaging and polishing disparate pieces of existing software, designed my a multitude of people for a for an even greater variety of reasons.
Distributions succeed at being usable collections of polished software, but they fail at being what I'd consider true operating systems because of the nature of their design and I for one hope that we continue to see more movement in projects aiming at the mobile and netbook market where it seems to be considered more important (or more plausible) to design the operating systems interface.
Granted, I'm not suggesting I'd like to see change for the sake of change but I would like to see a more serious attempt at OS design coming from somewhere in the Linux distribution space and right now that seems to be happening in the mobile space on platforms like Android and Moblin and I believe that the risk of good design could be a sea-change that doesn't just push Linux onto the desktop, but answers the question once and for all about the idea of a widely used free software platform. It simply makes too much economic sense.
Quack, quack.
Oh my, how dreadfully clever. Now be a good lad and get back polishing your VAIO until you're ready to start acting like a grown-up.
I'm running Fedora 11 on my Samsung N140 netbook and it wakes from suspend almost instantly. I can't see any reason to shut down and reboot when the battery will last quite a few days in suspend. With 2GB RAM, apps start and run nearly as fast as they do on my Core 2 Duo Thinkpad.
... says the extremely mature american who promotes his political health care agenda during a discussion on linux.
It looks nice, but I question the value of lowing a netbook's capability to toat of a smartphone/pda.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I see. You're offended that I called the notion that the health care bill has "death panels" absurd. How quaint!
I thought I told you to go polish your VAIO? Now, get. You want it to be nice and shiny for when those Glenn Beck torrents finish! If you're not a good boy, Dick Cheney will come and take you hunting with him!
Heh, I'm not offended at your talking points. I'm offended that you think you're arguing, when you're actually just spewing the same talking points offered elsewhere (for both linux liberals). Seriously, if you can't formulate a unique idea, at least steal something slightly more original.
And you call me a fanboy. At least I realize it.
Isn't this typical american bullsh!t. You assume I'm american, simply because you are. (Or for whatever reason). It's fairly indicative of how close-minded americans really are.