Moblin

[Andrew]

So, I've been hearing people talk about moblin on the internet for the past month or more, and I wasn't sure about whether it was as good as people made it out to be. It is an operating system meant for intel based netbooks, although it works on other devices (but they require intel gma 910/950/965, intel atom/core2duo). Intel is aiming for a 2 second boot time.

So I finally visited the website

http://moblin.org/

They've been releasing moblin v2.0 beta updated .iso every week.

To get a quick view of what it does, watch the 1:40 min video here. Really informative video.

The video looked good, and it shows a new look for an operating system. Much different than your normal one, suited more for small screens and quick access to stuff.

Canonical announced that they will be creating an ubuntu version. Hopefully it will be released for 9.10. It will be interesting to see how windows7 can compete with normal linux distros, and moblin based distros on netbooks.

There is a livecd image available to test it without affecting system. I'll probably try it. May be good for older laptops?

Anyone hear of this before? Any interest after seeing the video?

[Andrew]

Ok, so my computer meets requirements to run moblin even though it is not a netbook. core2duo and intel g965 x3000

I burned to livecd. It booted fine, although took longer than I expected to boot. Once loaded it was very impressive. Some slowdowns because of running from livecd, so I decided to burn to my usb stick. I had to go through several steps, eventually having to load a program in windows to burn the .img to usb stick, as ubuntu version would not work (maybe I needed to restart computer after installing program?).

Using the Moblin Live Image

Ok, so now I have it burned to my ocz rally2. It took 31 seconds from the first menu (boot/install moblin etc) to a fully functional desktop. Quite fast. It recognized my 1680*1050 resolution.

My internet works (wired ethernet), sound works. youtube works (so flash is installed by default).

Sadly it noticed my hard drive partitions but was unable to mount them. So I'm gonna have to load up another usb stick with music/movies and see how moblins works with them.

Overall this is a very innovative operating system. I'm not sure how win7 is going to compete on netbooks when it can not change or evolve.

If moblin gets more stable and finished in time for October, and netbook manufacturers truly have it installed by default, then it could work and increase linux marketshare that netbooks once had. I don't think MS would be happy with intel financing open source project OS to replace windows OS.

Forgot to mention, another cool thing is that there is no shutdown menu. You just press the power button and it shuts off quickly. Yesterday I was looking at friends 1.8ghz amd, 1gb ram, ati radeon 1250(?) (2007 laptop) vista laptop, and shutdown always takes literally a minute to shutdown. and it is slow as hell to start or do anything, so looks like ubuntu is going on it.

I put music/pics/video on usb. moblin noticed the pics, but no sigg of the video or music.

I was able to make moblin crash several times, but these appeared to be application crashes only, and didn't affect the rest of the OS or apps. Even after something crashed, I was able to go back into the same app. Some bugs and features missing, but very good for a beta, as most functionality is there.

[Andrew]

Moblin Bug Indicators

Some nice charts showing bugs for moblin.

From the last chart it looks like enough bugs are fixed that a release candidate could be released sometime soon (<2 weeks?).

There are also an increase in bug reports/fixes over time, so looks like more people have gotten interested in the project.

[Andrew]

First Moblin v2 netbook launches

They usually put out a new updated beta version every week or two. They havn't put out a new version in a month, so they are preparing for release candidate (or final version). Will be interesting news when they do release a new (final?) version.

That last Aug. 18 release was probably not the first release candidate, however. Said Sousou, as quoted by ZDNet UK, "Right now we're in the very final phase. Very minor but critical bug fixes are being done based on input from OEMs and OS vendors."

[Andrew]

Moblin 2.0 final released

They finally released moblin 2.0. Also released moblin garage (place to install software), and are now putting out moblin 2.1 alphas.

I should have it downloaded and tested for this weekend.