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Intel Software Linux

Moblin 2.0 Released, Intel's Linux For Netbooks 142

eldavojohn writes "Yesterday, Moblin, the joint OS project between Novell and Intel, was released as V2.0 Beta for netbooks with the image available for download. We've talked about Moblin before, but Computer World has an article speculating this is Intel's direct affront to Microsoft's Windows 7 by pointing out that Moblin is designed to optimally use Intel's Atom Processor and smaller screens so popular with netbooks. Windows 7's netbook competition doesn't stop there, as GoodOS's gOS3 Gadgets and Canonical's Ubuntu Netbook Remix are being designed to also take advantage of Intel's Atom, especially from a UI perspective. Ars has a look at Moblin's rich new UI as well. Back in April, Intel said it would support Windows 7 on the Atom later this year, and Intel also says Windows 7 is a good choice for Intel's netbooks, so it doesn't look like they're intentionally burning any bridges between them and Redmond."
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Moblin 2.0 Released, Intel's Linux For Netbooks

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  • Meh. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @12:28PM (#28027047)
    I'm waiting for them to release GLADOS for Netbooks.
  • by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @12:28PM (#28027051) Homepage Journal

    Oh wait, Moblin, not Goblin.

    Carry on.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by 2.7182 ( 819680 )
      Gollum was not a technically not goblin in the sense meant by Tolkien. He was some sort of proto-hobbit that had been warped by the ring. "Goblin" is a term used by Tolkien to mean orc. Although to be fair, wiki says

      "A goblin is an imaginary evil, crabby, and mischievous creature described as a grotesquely disfigured or gnome-like phantom, that may range in height from that of a dwarf to that of a human. "
    • That's Gollum, not goblin!

    • Tagged rhymeswithgoblin.
    • It definitely needs a new name. "Eunuchs or UNIX. Either way, there is no sex involved."
  • Duh. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jurily ( 900488 ) <jurily&gmail,com> on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @12:30PM (#28027077)

    that Moblin is designed to optimally use Intel's Atom Processor and smaller screens so popular with netbooks.

    I for one, welcome our new optimized-for-the-fucking-device-they-sell-it-with overlords.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I my self have learned to tell if I am using a quality OS by whether it installs a video editor (whether you want it or not) and has a dedicated system process watch over it and put it back in case you delete it.

      Some Linux OS's come with video editors, but unfortunately an admin can still uninstall it. I say Linux has a way to go before being ready for the general user. ;)

  • by Digital Pizza ( 855175 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @12:35PM (#28027159)

    How about a summary that describes the new Moblin release (what the post is ostensibly about), rather than focusing on the competition against Win7? How about being FOR something (Moblin in this case), rather than always being against Microsoft?

    I'm no fan of Microsoft, but seriously, the one-note, constant Microsoft bashing on this site is getting old.

    • by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @12:39PM (#28027225) Homepage

      Yep. I didn't upvote this in the FireHose because it seemed to be just a collection of "Intel makes something".

      Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] has a descriptive hands-on preview. Much more useful.

      • by je ne sais quoi ( 987177 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @01:09PM (#28027739)
        Thanks for the link. I found this comment very interesting:

        Intel recently turned over control of the project to the Linux Foundation with the aim of making it even more open to other contributors. The long-term goal is to turn Moblin into the nexus of mobile Linux development and make it the de facto standard Linux platform for portable devices.

        So, it's more than just that Intel is releasing this. It's Intel, working with the Linux Foundation in an attempt to create a new standard. Isn't this pretty much the ideal case for we've been asking for in open source? A propietary hardware manufacturer working with an open source consortium to create and release open source software. I'll view this collaboration as successful if we start seeing netbooks for sale from major OEMs with this OS installed.

        Oh, and some other random stuff I saw that I liked:
        -standard X11 window server and can run most linux apps
        -the clutter organizational scheme looks intriguing but I'd have to use it for awhile before I could tell you if I liked it or not.
        -It's using the gecko HTML rendering engine. What's interesting here is it is not using webkit.
        -Lastly, I'd like to see something on how well the wireless network device works and changing networks. The article was a bit short on this aspect. Has anybody used it? How is it?

        • I used the alpha. I am about to install it to my netbook's hard drive; hopefully it provides a way to upgrade. I would presume the answer is yes, but it's pretty rough.

          I kind of like XFCE, though. I hope this UI can be disabled easily. The second important note is whether (since this is Fedora-based) the Fedora repos can be enabled without making the computer do bad crashy things.

          The other point that the summary neglected to mention is that this project is the first real implementation of Arjan Van De Ven's work on fast booting. He's the guy that made his Eee boot in five seconds. [lwn.net] Moblin can be expected to boot fast, which I think is necessary if we're going to recategorize netbooks from 'underpowered miniature laptop' to 'powerful internet appliance'.

          A friend of mine bought a macbook a few months ago because she needed a computer that was extremely simple and user-friendly. Macs are somewhat better in that regard than PCs, but the computer is still pretty incomprehensible to her. This new UI is probably not for the slashdot crowd (anyone who can tell you why it's important that Moblin has a (relatively) standard Xorg server is not really the intended audience), but I think for the common Joe or Jocelyn it's perfect. Especially if you were ever wanting to make a $100 netbook...if the price point is sufficiently low to the point where it's clear you're not buying a Real Computer, and stick this UI on it, you can both set new expectations for what the device is supposed to do and sell a lot of toys to people that don't really have any use for a Real Computer.

          Random points:
          Webcam support is essential.
          The social networking pane needs to be Facebook, not Twitter.
          um, End of Line?

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm no fan of Microsoft, but seriously, the one-note, constant Microsoft bashing on this site is getting old.

      It's easy to spot MS shills. Most of the time they say something like that.
      "I'm no fan of MS, but.." or
      "I'll play the devil's advocate.." or
      "I hate MS as much as the next guy, but.."

      -N.S.Sherlock

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      bash ms all day. long time slashdot lurker here. I hadn't heard about moblin until I read this article (and subsequently the ars technica article w/ screens), so it served its purpose for me.

    • by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @01:02PM (#28027625) Journal

      How about a summary that describes the new Moblin release (what the post is ostensibly about), rather than focusing on the competition against Win7? How about being FOR something (Moblin in this case), rather than always being against Microsoft?

      I'm no fan of Microsoft, but seriously, the one-note, constant Microsoft bashing on this site is getting old.

      Well, it's edited pretty much how it's submitted so I'll take full responsibility for this one.

      I guess I'm confused though. I didn't seem to think my summary was pro or anti Microsoft--merely focusing on what else is out there besides Windows 7 for netbooks and pointing out that Intel may have an unfair advantage in this department. If anything, I was hoping for discourse containing thoughtful comments about Intel's upper hand in pointing Novell in the correct direction for optimally using the chips/chipset/gpu in these hardware devices surrounding the Atom process.

      When I looked for other stories to reference this one to [google.com], I found 10 or more talking about Windows 7 on the netbook and one talking about Moblin (the on linked in the story). I'm sorry for not continuing the trend of talking about Windows 7 and am disappointed you think my submission was a veiled attempt to attack Microsoft. I am anti-Microsoft but I try to keep that relegated to my posts down here instead of in the summary.

      Specifically what did I write that was offensive to you? I also found the title of the Computerworld article to be speculation but the actual text to have level headed statements from Intel (something I tried to reflect in the summary). I guess I failed and I apologize for making Slashdot seem so biased ... we really do need to shake that image at least a little bit to be taken seriously.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by kthejoker ( 931838 )

        I see it less as antagonistic, and more of "Why even mention Microsoft at all?" The summary comes across as an analysis of Moblin as compared to Windows 7 (and a larger overview of how Windows 7 fits in to the future of netbook OSes) instead of just saying,

        "Hey, look, Intel released a new OS for netbooks. Take a look."

        Which would've been much more to the point.

        • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          So when I mentioned gOS3 and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, that was offensive to them because I was comparing Moblin to them ... ? You have not convinced me of anything at all.

          One more thing:

          "Hey, look, Intel released a new OS for netbooks. Take a look."

          Oh that doesn't sound like a Slashvertisement? Someone got modded highly for criticizing the story is just "intel makes something" [slashdot.org] which is not a story.

      • If anything, I was hoping for discourse containing thoughtful comments...

        This is where things went poopy for ya.

    • You must be new here... it's been old for years.

      Not even that I'm a fan, but it does get old. If BillG cured cancer tomorrow they'd say he started it.

      But really, competition is what this is all about - and Windows 7 is looking pretty decent. Linux needs to compete with that next, why not start getting ahead of it before release time comes around?

    • by Tetsujin ( 103070 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @01:18PM (#28027905) Homepage Journal

      How about a summary that describes the new Moblin release (what the post is ostensibly about), rather than focusing on the competition against Win7? How about being FOR something (Moblin in this case), rather than always being against Microsoft?

      I'm no fan of Microsoft, but seriously, the one-note, constant Microsoft bashing on this site is getting old.

      OK, what "Microsoft bashing"?

      These products (Moblin, Windows 7, etc.) are in competition with one another in the netbook market. If Moblin achieves some level of success in the netbook market, that reduces the number of netbooks sold with Windows 7. So, the summary states (quite correctly) that this system is a threat to Windows in the netbook market. Any well-packaged system optimized for the platform would be. It's just a fact.

    • It's a result of the fact that that is where it is focused and the fact that we want to see competition everywhere.

    • ... because the violations and shenanigans of MS keep getting old as well.

  • Very promising (Score:5, Interesting)

    by javacowboy ( 222023 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @12:43PM (#28027297)

    I looked at the screenshots, and this looks really cool. They've put a lot of thought into the GUI, which is not only designed for netbooks and small screens, but touch screens as well.

    Moblin is also totally open source, meaning that they won't charge for it and they'll get contributions from the larger open source community.

    Unless Microsoft has some secret feature in Windows 7 designed for netbooks that nobody's heard of, then Linux could reclaim the lead in netbook OS's. If somebody ports Moblin to ARM, then Microsoft is in even bigger trouble.

    • Re:Very promising (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @01:30PM (#28028091)

      It's clear they did put a lot of effort in designing the UI. We've got a couple netbooks around the office and I'm tempted to try it out. But from another review, the reviewer noted that it's not packaged with binary drivers. So if you are stuck with certain Wifi cards it may suffer the same pain in the ass that linux generally does: having to track down a damned driver.

      That being said, using it with a netbook preloaded with Mobilin where all the hardware is designed to work with linux from the get go....it's worth considering.

      • Fortunately netbooks have a slightly less varied range of hardware choices... slightly. What would be very cool of them to do is recruit various enthusiasts who are already tweaking Linux on their own netbooks to tweak moblin loads for specific models. Then you can just grab the image for whatever netbook you have. Sure, there are lots of them out there now... but the major ones could certainly be done -- say like my little ASUS 900a and my Dell Mini9 with EDGE/GPRS card..?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by crush ( 19364 )
        It's an interesting point you make.
        Currently it's worth avoiding netbooks that have the following hardware:

        1. Intel GMA500 aka Poulsbo graphics chipsets. There is no FOSS driver for these. That's because there's a PowerVR core in them. The Fedora Project's Adam Williamson seems [fedoraproject.org] to have found some partial drivers hidden away in a quiet little Ubuntu repository where they were dumped by the Intel team. But success seems partial. So for now avoid anything with GMA500.

        2. Broadcom wireless. Again avo
        • So, the bottom line is that the Dell Mini 10v might be OK as regards the graphics (it's GMA950) which in turn means that it doesn't do HDMI and has an unfortunately lower vertical resolution than the Mini10v, but the wireless sucks and the touchpad probably sucks, the RAM is fixed too low.

          You obviously meant a different laptop model for one of those because the Mini 10v can't have a lower resolution than the Mini 10v. Which model were you talking about?

      • by gknoy ( 899301 )

        So if you are stuck with certain Wifi cards it may suffer the same pain in the ass that linux generally does: having to track down a damned driver.

        With backing from Intel, I'd be surprised if we didn't see an open source driver (or even a binary closed-source one?) that was available "out of the box" for the Centrino chipset's wireless hardware. Since so many vendors are likely to use such a bundled package, that covers a lot of the spectrum already -- just like if the intel graphics driver is available. (

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by crush ( 19364 )

          FOSS drivers are only available for GMA945, GMA950 chipsets in current notebooks. Anything with the GMA500 may or may not work with some hard-to-get-ahold-of proprietary blobs. See my post abopve. It sucks. Intel have made a good name for themselves in the past with Freeing their drivers but this GMA500 thing is muddying the market and causing uncertainty. In the past I would have felt happy that choosing Intel was going to mean FOSS drivers but now I'd think twice before recommending them or purchasin

    • But I guess Moblin isn't related to OLPC Sugar at all? It's a shame OLPC already went down this road and, I guess, failed. But maybe Intel will have more luck.
      • I guess it depends on what you mean by "failed". There were some cool/interesting things about OLPC, but they couldn't get the price down as low as they wanted, and from what I hear they had various political issues (including Microsoft trying to get Windows onto them). That's not to say they had no effect, or that some of what they developed won't make it into other things.
        • I wouldn't consider OLPC overall a failure, but apparently they droped the custom Linux (Sugar) for Windows, if so then Sugar didn't succeed in that market.
    • by Eil ( 82413 )

      I looked at the screenshots, and this looks really cool. They've put a lot of thought into the GUI, which is not only designed for netbooks and small screens, but touch screens as well.

      I've been dreaming of a multi-purpose GUI that was suitable for everything from set-top boxes, to phones, to car PCs for a solid decade now. The computing power has always been there, but practically no software or even GUI libraries are written with the assumption that the user might want to interface with the applications b

      • I spent months designing an entire UI that would be suitable for both set-top boxes and car PCs. But I'm not really a programmer so I didn't know where to go from there and couldn't find anyone else that was interested in helping to make it a reality.

        You could build a mock-up, a wireframe or html prototype [boxesandarrows.com], and send it with comments to one of several projects open to people submitting ideas for new interactions (Gnome, KDE, Firefox).

        You may not get your whole idea implemented, but you can help those guys ad

    • How hard would it be to slap Moblin into Android?

      Since Android is already running on a netbook [trustedreviews.com], and already runs on ARM, I suspect this is not so hard.

    • Unless Microsoft has some secret feature in Windows 7 designed for netbooks that nobody's heard of, then Linux could reclaim the lead in netbook OS's.

      Dual-core Atom CPU with NVIDIA ION graphics. 1-2 GB RAM. 160 GB HDD. 9" display or better.

      With specs like those you don't need a secret feature.

      You only need to say that your Win 7 netbook runs pretty much everything 32 bit Windows. Hardware and software.

      Including enough games to keep you occupied for the next five years.

    • ... just based on screenshots?

      An user interface has to be *used* in order to provide any useful evaluation.

  • Do you "take advantage of Intel's Atom ... from a UI perspective"? (and don't confuse "User Interface" with display technology)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      The same way 'NetBurst' was to make your Internet surfing faster....

      I still remember when Dilbert was 'Optimized for Intel', basically added a useless java app to slow the page for anyone on a slower CPU. I lost some respect for Adams on that one, though i'm not sure how much he was consulted.

  • Download speed (Score:3, Informative)

    by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @12:51PM (#28027435) Homepage Journal

    Or shall I say download slowness:

    2.8 of 666 MB (3.8 KB/sec) 2 days, 1 hour remaining.

    Not to mention that they mention a VMWare image on a page, link to the download page and no VMWare image can be found there.

  • ...have to do with the interface really? My understanding is that most netbook builds tweak disk and UI related functions which hardly have any relevance to the processor. The summary implies that these non-Moblin builds have optimizations/customizations that improve the function with the Intel Atom processor, but I'm guessing this is not yet true. Naturally, the customized UIs have been an awesome improvement for the netbooks, but that would be true regardless of Intel's Atom Processor.
    • by Molochi ( 555357 )

      Maybe they don't want hordes of cheap, 5 year old centrino notebooks with Moblin flooding Ebay? Say, that's not a bad idea...

  • This will be the year of Linux netbook. We'll take whatever we can get.
  • Back in April, Intel said it would support Windows 7 on the Atom later this year, and Intel also says Windows 7 is a good choice for Intel's netbooks, so it doesn't look like they're intentionally burning any bridges between them and Redmond."

    Unfortunately, nobody ever sold a new idea by sitting on the fence. Until a computer manufacturer starts pro-actively pushing Linux on their hardware as (rightly or wrongly) better than Windows, Linux will not take off.

    As long as the line is "do you want Windows or Linux on that, Sir", and the seller gets paid whichever way, Windows will be the easiest sell to the typical punter and before you know it it will be "Linux? Oh, there's not much demand for that, we'd have to do a special order". That's basic

    • It's the apps. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The Linux world is fractured, meaning that a single binary will only work on a small fraction of all Linux distros. Windows is binary compatible across its desktops. OS X is binary compatible across its desktops. Without a unified market,

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by itsdapead ( 734413 )

        The Linux world is fractured, meaning that a single binary will only work on a small fraction of all Linux distros.

        But with Linux, the distro usually comes with comes with all the applications you can eat, either on disc or in the online repositories. This is the preferred way for non-techies to get their apps (whereas no true slashdotter would install a binary package when they could roll their own tarball instead).

        Punters need to be told this, not "oh, er, well we do Windows as well if you like".

        Because most of the popular applications are Free, the application publisher doesn't have to support every distro and ar

      • Except that it's not. A binary written for one distro will usually run on another of the same general age. This is, after all, why tools such as "alien" exist. If anything, the Windows market is more fragmented than Linux by virtue of programs being written explicitly for the most current version of Windows i.e. the entire OS must be current.

        Linux programs tend to only target current versions of certain libraries, not the entire OS. When was the last time you saw a userland application that demanded a c

      • A single binary in Windows ahs a chance in hell to run is transplanted to a different machine, specially if it is a 3rd party application (you have a better chance with binaries that come as part of Windows, but I would be surprised if they don't start DRR signing them in the future).

    • Windows 7 is the easier sell because:

      The netbook has the horsepower to run pretty much everything 32 bit Windows - including a huge number of older PC games.

      If a billion or so users are shopping netbooks - it's a good bet that 900 million or so of them have Windows apps ready to load and run.

      Their USB and WiFi devices should work just fine.

      The comfort level for the Windows user is Windows - and the netbook becomes just another Windows appliance.

      It's easy to visualize the distinctive - marketable - OSX or Wi

  • Since x86 code runs on lpia, what is there to claim that they "support" ?

  • Weird (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Weird.

    Here you are, cheering for a company that just got massive fines from the EU. Strange bedfellows.

    I hope your new overloads serve you well. But do not count on it. Lessons learned from the other monopoly you so fiercely oppose?

    Devil's children have the devil's luck.

    • Odd phrase. Intel did some bad stuff to AMD, and they deserved that fine entirely. However, unlike Redmond, Intel makes good products, so we like them.

      This is open source software. If you don't like Intel's direction, you can fork their project. However, given that they are paying some very talented people to work on this project, I'm fine with them having control over it.

      You're not afraid of anything in particular; there's nothing to be afraid of. You are just bitter and harbouring a grudge against Intel a

  • by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @02:20PM (#28028825) Homepage

    When the eee PC came out, Linux had a big opportunity. Unfortunately, Asus completely blew the details of the implementation. They picked a sucky distro, and they did a lousy job on quality control and integration. My wife uses linux on the desktop, and when she saw the eee at Target for $280 she asked me to get her one for her birthday. The model they were selling at Target was out of date and not very good, so I ordered a fancier model on amazon for $400. It came with its wifi misconfigured, and Asus tech support told me they couldn't fix it, and I'd have to return it. This was a few months ago. Yesterday I was making a trip to Fry's, so my wife suggested I just buy one while I was there. Well, Fry's is now selling the eee only with Windows, and Amazon's site also doesn't have the linux version available. AFAICT retailers were just getting too many returns of the linux ones. You can pretty much tell what was going on based on the amazon reviews. Some, like mine, were being shipped misconfigured. In other cases, you had people buying the linux version and not understanding that it wasn't windows. And in still other cases, people were buying them with linux and then trying to install a (presumably illegal) copy of Windows, and failing. (None of this is new, either. All this stuff happened in the past with the Great Quality linux boxes they used to sell at Fry's. The hardware was in fact great quality, but Fry's was getting too many returns, so they stopped carrying them.)

    I think the basic problem here is that it's expensive and difficult to do a good job integrating hardware and software for a consumer computer. That's the kind of thing Apple is famous for doing well. Apple puts a lot of money and effort into it, and they charge for it when you buy a mac. I just don't see how anyone is going to do anything like that in the netbook market, which is an ultra-low-margin market. It would have been especially difficult for East Asian manufacturers like Asus and Great Quality, which have a language barrier to deal with. (At one point, Great Quality was shipping their machines with a linux distro that didn't even have an English-language web site.)

    Meanwhile, MS can afford to do what it takes to maintain dominance in all sectors of the market. MS doesn't even have to do a good job on netbooks. They just have to avoid doing such a horrible job that it becomes painfully obvious to people who have never used anything but Windows before. It's possible that ARM-based netbooks will change the equation, but I wouldn't be surprised if MS jumps in and starts competing vigorously on ARM, simply to maintain their monopoly.

    • ARM doesn't matter. When the chipset, screen and SSD chew more power than the CPU, the CPU is the least of your worries.

      • how come this [alwaysinnovating.com] offers

        an amazing 10 to 15 hours of battery life for less than 2 pounds.

        ?
        powertop shows a differences of just 3watts between low brighness display and blacked out,
        *plus smaller displays use less power anyway (could somebody explain why you cant just use an array of white LEDs to backlight your screen though, its the backlight that uses the power right?)
        *the are low power usage wireless chips, but i thought the main reason wireless drains power is because it has to wake up the CPU (on lower power CPUs this is a non-issue)
        *graphics chips (where choice of chip

        • by vipw ( 228 )

          To answer your question about using white LEDs as a backlight: it costs slightly more. That being said, many notebook screens are now LED backlit. It's a selling point since they are more power efficient and brighter.

          More details:
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlight#LED_backlights [wikipedia.org]

          Pixel Qi is supposed to be shipping screens in volume this year. That could be interesting.

    • I agree. The linux versions sold on the Eee pc and aspire one felt cheap and thrown together compared to the distros they were based on. Netbooks shipping with Moblin or Ubuntu Netbook Remix would have much more success against Windows 7. Especially since Microsoft practically gave away XP home as a knee-jerk reaction to the new linux threat. I also think that most of the returns weren't just because they didn't have windows but because they were expecting a full-featured laptop that was small and cheap
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by itsdapead ( 734413 )

      When the eee PC came out, Linux had a big opportunity.

      I think the original EEE PC must be the most successful failure ever. People bought them by the shedload (including me) and raved about them, until it became obvious that they were as much practical use as a chocolate teapot. A very, very cute chocolate teapot maybe, and one that hadn't cost enough to get angry about, but not really a lot of use.

      The problem wasn't necessarily Linux - its the hardware: the screen was just too small for running desktop software or full-size websites (iPod Touch/iPhone and An

    • Well it would have helped if _some_ manufacturers(*cough* acer *cough*) would have released some sort of documentation with their linux computers so you could at least do something with it. I bet if they had some sort of instruction manual to do basic tasks and used a more popular distro, then they would have had a lot less returns
  • Apparently Intel didn't play the first two Zelda games. It's Molblin, dammit!
  • Can't say if this is the real deal, but you can download, install it in a VM and verify before the image on the moblin site finishes.

    Download [linux23.com]
  • by Dega704 ( 1454673 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @03:11PM (#28029565)
    At least a couple times a week I see a new article by some journalist rambling on about how linux will never take off and we will all pay homage to Microsoft for the rest of our lives, but just look at the efforts being put into linux by some of the biggest players. IBM, Intel, Dell, and HP just off the top of my head. It seems to me like they all very much want it to thrive. And why wouldn't they? Their fates have been defined by Microsoft for two decades now. I can only imagine how enticing linux must seem to them. An OS they can mold into whatever they need it to be without having to pay licensing fees to anyone. Don't get me wrong, I'm no anti-Microsoft zealot and I think windows is here to stay, but the mono-culture hit it's peak with XP. The biggest thing holding linux back from being a major contender is figuring out how to ween users off of windows, and Moblin is just the latest experiment on how it can be done. The next couple of years will be very interesting.
  • This isn't a "2.0 release." It's just a beta. Who cares about betas? Unless it's Gmail, of course.
  • In case you actually want to try this sometime in the next few days. I suggest getting via bittorrent. It is on the bay:

    http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4904993/moblin-netbook-ux-beta-20090518-004 [thepiratebay.org]

  • by alizard ( 107678 ) <alizard&ecis,com> on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @09:13PM (#28034359) Homepage
    The netbook looks enough like a "real computer" that people expect to see conventional-looking desktops on it. This is a major reason why XP-Home is the dominant player at this point, if XP-Home had been repackaged as the netappliance desktop suppliers of netbook "Linux" are under delusion that the public wants, and the XP desktops were locked down so you couldn't install standard Windows apps to them, nobody would buy XP-Home netbooks, either.

    IMO, Intel's efforts would be better spent building drivers for Open Source distros so that more netbooks will run straight out of the box with Open Source installed, and pushing vendors to install conventional desktop UIs rather than "netbook UIs".

    Smartphones don't have that problem because people don't have fixed expectations as to what a smartphone desktop ought to look like, it just has to be easy to use and mildly extensible.

    That said, I'm running Kubuntu Jaunty 'right out of the box' on my Eee PC900 (and yes, that's a 900MHz computer with the original 1G DRAM) . . . without concern about my warranty because it lives on an SDHC flash card sitting in the internal card reader. Looks great, works well, and it's a standard KDE4.2.2 desktop.

    Find out how here [informit.com]. Just Part 1, the tweaks needed for Ubuntu-Intrepid described in Part II are not needed with the new Kubuntu. If you don't have an Eee PC900, make sure Kubuntu-Jaunty has the drivers required to support your netbook or you know where to get them first. Google is your friend.
  • by badzilla ( 50355 )

    I really wanted to have Linux on my Acer Aspire One but the struggle was just too much. I spent days then gave up with Linpus, then tried again unsuccessfully with eeebuntu. It's now got Windows 7 and runs fine.

    Is it too much to want to close the lid on a netbook and then everything to come back again when I open it? And to get a bluetooth 3G modem connection without huge messing about?

  • OK I read the news (?) here and downloaded the image, then tried it in VirtualBox and on a Dell Vostro 1500 Centrino/Core 2 Duo system. It's not exactly a netbook but it's intel through and through down to the WiFi card. It loaded in VirtualBox but didn't know what to do with the video exactly, so it was slow and working but only 800x600 and the right-hand icons were thus inaccessible — widescreen is mandatory. On the Vostro everything was great except, unfortunately, networking; trying to bring up ne

  • Sho blin?

One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis

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