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.'"

Moblin?

[TheFlannelAvenger]

http://zelda.wikia.com/wiki/Moblin [wikia.com] How are pig bulldog monster things going to help my netbook experience?

Re:

[paziek]

Well, if you are gonna try to escape, they won't let you get to any Windows.

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:

[Ian Alexander]

Considering the number of moblins I've killed playing Zelda they could probably have picked a better name. ;)

Re:

[commodore64_love]

Can someone tell me what's wrong with Slashdot's front page? I want my low-bandwidth, dialup-friendly version back but despite changing my preference multiple times, I'm getting some frakked-up yellow-and-white monstrosity.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it not more like MOBile LINux?

Great a notebook with a broken package manager

[yossarianuk]

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...

Re:

[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:

[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
• sup

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 [fedoraproject.org] 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.

Re:

[EsbenMoseHansen]

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).

Thanks for answering. I haven't used an RPM based distribution since Suse 7.2, so I was somewhat behind.

* 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 [fedoraproject.org] 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

From reading the link, I think you misunderstood me. Probably my fault... but cute integration feature on that page :) Sort of like missing-command but for file types and fonts.

What I meant that when installing a package, there are often related packages. A stupid example: I install a compiler. Now, having a compiler without its standard library is technically possible, but probably not what the user wan

Re:

[transwarp]

YaST in SUSE has recommended packages. Installing a package sets recommended dependencies to install, but if you choose not to install them, or have them version-locked or set to never install, it doesn't complain. That's my experience at least, I don't know if it's the intended behavior.

Re:

[crush]

Sounds like you might be interested in SuSE's patterns [opensuse.org]. Supposedly PackageKit will be doing this stuff in the near future too.

I think you might be able to solve that problem with YUM by defining your own groups in a comp file for your own repository (or spin of Fedora) (see this link [baseurl.org] and also search "man yum.conf" for group_package_types) and choosing to make your hypothetical standard library a "Default" package type.

Not quite as simple as .deb Suggests, Enhances and Recommends but still do-able and Packag

PackageKit "catalogs"

[crush]

That was an old link that I supplied and the correct name for PK is a catalog. The idea is that it's more appropriate to define such relationships at a level higher than that of actual package (whether .deb, .rpm or whatever) relationships. That way if you want to be able to provide a simple way for someone to get the ideal environment for developing on Whizzbang compiler with Whacko-lib then you can provide the catalog and it will work not just for rpm-based systems, but also deb-based and whatever else.

Re:

[JesseMcDonald]

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

Just out of curiosity, does it actually track which packages were automatically installed, like apt, or does it simply remove all the seemingly-unused dependencies, even the ones specifically requested by the user?

Re:

[oddityfds]

• 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.

yum install yum-utils
package-cleanup --leaves

• 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.

I don't think so, but as crush mentioned PackageKit will sometimes suggest packages to install.

• support for packages deprecating and/or providing other packages

Sure.

• support for running configuration utilities and such during installation

No, RPM package installation is completely non-interactive by design.

rpm+yum+PackageKit

[oddityfds]

Moblin has about as much Fedora roots as it has SUSE roots and the package management does come from Fedora, not from SUSE, AFAICT.

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically, we will be seeing some SUSE-ization of Moblin.

It's GNU/SuSE/Moblin/Linux you insensitive clod!

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.

Re:

[jonaskoelker]

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.

Next time you see them, tell them from me that they should go with BetaMax! ;)

Ok can someone explain?

[shomon2]

What do I need to read and where do I need to go to get android running on one of those old oneTs? Or whatever - it's a testing ground, sold to a very generic audience. I would love to be able to run an ubuntu distro on there, although android sounds worth trying on a netbook.

One thing about netbooks though is they are half way between a phone and a computer, so they shouldn't need to be so complicated - both in interface design and in expectations. Another is this reliance on google docs or youtube and oth