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."

Comments

Concept best applied as a shell/containment

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Concept best applied as a shell/containment

[Aphoxema]

I really liked MoblinV2 when I tried it on my wind but it seemed to keep falling short of my needs. Pairing my bluetooth mouse more than once was too much trouble, and I had all sorts of little nags. The way the bar at the top popped up every time I tried to close a window or anything was a nuisance.

So many things right are easily undone by the problems underneath. I'd just like to see the Clutter interface for Ubuntu, and more unique interfaces in general.

Re:Concept best applied as a shell/containment

[Enderandrew]

Reading up on community responses to Moblin, it seems like many are not quite satisfied with the package selection, stability, and overall polish of the distro.

I'm certainly not an Ubuntu fan by any means, but one thing they do well, is have ten million packages ready for their distro. The more new distros out there that pop up, the more we fragment the community on packaging for each of these distros, and providing community support for each distro.

Conversely, the benefits Moblin provides is not suddenly primarily offered up only to those who are willing to migrate away from the distros they already enjoy, and give up the opportunity cost those distros might currently provide them.

Moblin is open-source, but if they focused their energy on simply providing a shell and optimizations for the Atom processor, that code would more easily directly benefit all existing distros, while requiring less effort on Intel's part, as opposed to creating an entire distro.

Re:Concept best applied as a shell/containment

[Orange Crush]

I just want Moblin's atom optimizations and boot speed improvements rolled in to Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I'm pretty happy with UNR on my Acer Aspire One, and as much as I disliked the stock install of Linpus, it *did* have much better battery life and bootup times.

I don't want the stupid UI running on top of another distro, I want the under-the-hood improvements.

Um...who?

[filesiteguy]

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?

Once again a geeky name sinks good product

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Once again a geeky name sinks good product

[Estragib]

I get "Mobile Linux", but maybe I'm strange.

Re:Once again a geeky name sinks good product

[H0p313ss]

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.

Interesting logic. I guess it's also hard for you to sell a product that's named after something as fragile as a pane of glass then?

No - we need a speedy handheld device experience

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Great!

[aminorex]

Now can I get that on a snapdragon 1.5GHz please?

Ditching Windows on Netbooks

[imgod2u]

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.

Re:Not really very interesting

[node 3]

Just a waste of time, this moblin thing.

Correct, because everyone is just like you.

NOT READY, DO NOT WANT

[drinkypoo]

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

Re:NOT READY, DO NOT WANT

[drinkypoo]

We're talking about a 900 MHz coppermine celeron here, it is plenty fast for the kinds of machines commonly available in a handheld. Intel made it, two years is really not that long, they should not crap on it. But seriously, it ran like shit on the Aspire One D250.

Re:NOT READY, DO NOT WANT

[jawtheshark]

I own a 701 too and it is indeed plenty fast. The thing is, that CPU isn't two years old as you claim. It's from 2001. So, two years ago, it was already 6 years old. It is also Asus who chose the chip and not Intel.

Anyway, that's not my point. I don't think "mlund" was criticizing anything about the CPU. He was most certainly talking about the screen size and only that. As an 701 owner, I must agree with him: it's really too small and pretty much all other netbooks came with 1024x600 resolution which at least is close to 1024x768 form days yonder. 800x480 is really limited. It is usable with a Window Manager like LXDE but you need to tweak applications left and right (Less "To" fields in the Thunderbird compose window, for example). Personally, I think that the Asus 900 series would have been the better choice for me, but I just couldn't wait and had to have my toy.

(I still use my Asus EEE 701 pretty much everyday.... Runs Debian just fine... Application statup times are a bit high, but I guess that's the SSD)

Different..

[msimm]

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.