Submitted by “The Moblin project steering committee today announces the project release of Moblin v2.1 for Intel Atom processor-based netbooks and nettops. This project release includes the broadest feature additions, customer requested improvements, and overall polish to date. With this community release you will see significant feature additions and improvements including enhanced browser functionality and plug-in support, UI enhancements, support for 3G data connections, Bluetooth device management, input method support for localized languages, integrated application installer for the Moblin Garage, performance and stability improvements, and additional overall help and documentation.”
This surely has an interesting interface. Unfortunately Netbooks are in a price range here where I live that is much more interesting to buy a full fledged Notebook than getting one of those, but I guess I’d happily use Moblin (based on the videos) if I had one.
I’m trying to make the .img thing booting on Virtualbox to see if it’s as good as it looks.
The entire user interface in Moblin is accelerated via OpenGL. Getting it to run in a VM may not provide you with a solid impression of the OS. Moblin requires SSE3 and an Intel graphics chipset (except for GMA 500), so you can run it on quite a variety of hardware by putting the image onto a 1GB+ USB drive and booting from that. I have both a Toshiba netbook and an IBM Thinkpad, and it works on both. The Thinkpad has a Core2 Duo and GMA965, the Toshiba an Atom and GMA945. The interface is quite to my liking – i prefer it on my Thinkpad to Windows 7.
Thanks for the info! I have a core2duo GMA965 notebook and I’ll give it a try with Moblin to see how it fares.
I wonder if it’ll really take less battery than a regular linux distro. It would make it a good candidate for when running solely on battery power for longer times, to read articles and, perhaps with some modification, have a text editor to program in a very very simple environment (text editor + compiler)
Good luck with that. I was able to get Moblin (well, the previous version, anyway) to at least do something by adding a new “floppy image” in the form of the ISO to boot from (if I remember right). Didn’t get very far, as it booted only to tell me that it required an Atom processor, and would not run on my AMD64. Or maybe it was a .IMG file, I don’t remember. All I know is that it needed to be “attached” as a floppy image and after that, it just didn’t work.
Edited 2009-11-08 05:48 UTC
Downloading.
2.0 was interesting, but simple stuff like installing support for different video codecs was a PITA. If that’s been solved in this release I might stick with it for a while.
OK, so I’ve installed it on my Aspireone:
-Boots fast (same as 2.0).
-Runs fast (same as 2.0).
-The UI for the package manager looks better, but there’s almost no software available.
-The default browser seems to be more usable now.
-How the hell am I supposed to connect to a wired network without a DHCP server? ifconfig? Come on.
-Still no sane way to install codecs. At least now I get a suggestion: “try to download gstreamer codecs from internet”… yeah sure, if only it was that easy.
So summing up: looks great and runs great, but it’s still pretty much useless.
Edited 2009-11-08 12:42 UTC
I’d love to use Moblin for it’s interface and Linux goodness, but I’m going to continue using OS X on my Dell Mini 10v so that I can sync my Google Apps Calendar and Contacts to the native applications. Having ubiquitous calendar and contacts is a deal breaker for me.
I had not been following the Moblin project, but decided to install it on my EEE PC 901 while awaiting a larger SSD for Windows 7. I was very surprised at the startup speed and user interface compared to other netbook operating systems I have tested. Compared even to XP, the speed of the interface on the Itel/Atom processor platform is really amazing.
Overall, the layout of the UI is nice, but some minor things like accessing your bookmarks in the Mozilla browser can be frustrating. Also switching between panels requires a lot of cursor movement to launch simultaneous apps. It really feels designed for a single-app interface like a phone where I usually like to multi-task more on a netbook.
Connecting to my wireless WPA2 secured router worked out of the box as expected. After putting the system to sleep, I noticed that the re-connect was problematic. I can see that the OS is trying to reconnect, but hangs at authenticating. I think this is more of a problem with my D-Link router and AES as this can sometimes occur on my desktop Windows 7 machine.
All of the applications seem to have a smart default value for the size to take better advantage of the screen real estate. A persistent toolbar to launch frequently used apps without opening a panel would be nice.
Overall, I think this is a pretty good attempt at a netbook OS to address problems with limited screen real estate and CPU speed.
I’d like OSNews to have a separate tab/page for OS releases.