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."

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I once went looking for an API to their shell infrastructure, curious as to how extensible it was and how to write my own activities for it. But on their site they only provided links to documentation to existing libraries they use. I didn't look at the actual code but I have a bad feeling it's just a monolithic application and not an extensible desktop environment.

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:Not really very interesting

[node 3]

Just a waste of time, this moblin thing.

Correct, because everyone is just like you.

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.

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.

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.