Guest post by Intel just announced the Moblin 2 alpha release available to the public for testing. Get out the good old netbook and have a go with the release; it’s confirmed to work relatively well with the Acer Aspire One and the Dell Mini 9. Those of you with bitty Eee netbooks aren’t completely left out in the cold– you’ll just have to go without wireless for the time being.
Moblin 2 is Intel’s answer to the ever-growing mobile market, designed specifically for Atom-based devices. The current alpha release is geared toward netbooks, but Intel has been working on its own secret schemes to release a device that will use Moblin 2 that I’m calling, for the lack of a better word, a “smartbook:” a weird MID stuck in limbo between the netbook and the smartphone.
Moblin 2 is a Linux distribution heavily based off of Fedora, utilizing the Xfce desktop environment. However, Moblin is expected to drop Xfce in releases in the unforeseeable future for a somewhat more mobile-friendly environment using the Clutter network under development by OpenHand, which Intel acquired last year. Though Moblin is greatly inspired by Fedora, it has a good deal of customizations that make it much more suitable for mobile devices than Fedora, including a unique Internet connection manager and better booting performance.
The source code can be downloaded from the project’s repository, or ISO images are available either through downloading pre-made default images or by using the Moblin Custom Image Creator tool.
Intel is very proud to finally be releasing the alpha of Moblin 2, but users beware: the alpha is very rough around the edges, and even in patches in the middle, so you may want to wait before making it your sole OS of choice on your netbook. While Intel is making leaps and bounds under the hood, the user experience pales a bit when in comparison with other mobile distributions. All this in a nutshell directly from the Moblin download page: “The Moblin platform is still in a preliminary, alpha-quality stage. It is not recommended for production workstations. However, all are welcome to try out the images who are willing to accept a few frayed edges.”
Men, I love desktops.
I took a screenshot of the task manager, judge by yourself.
http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/3361/moblinhf2.jpg
Take a look at that:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_moblin_2&n…
Fast!
Way faster than my own optimised system! If you switch from xorg to XFBdev and use an accelerated framebuffer driver, this thing can boot even faster, almost instant on. Boot speed is a weaness in Linux (for netbook), it is not faster than Windows. It is mostly why windows is becoming the OS of choice on netbook, manifacturer don’t see why they should push Linux, it is not faster, it is not better and cause a lot of frustration from new user… This may help, I hope so.
Not to burst your bubble but you do realize the faster laptop is fast because of the SSD its equipped with right?
Elv13 wasn’t referring to the difference between the two computers in the video, rather that both appeared to boot faster than his own optimized system. Seeing as both are using Moblin. However, I’m impressed by the speed of the SSD machine. Now if only a couple hundered gig SSD was the same price as the same size HDD.
same price, same lousy quality – no thanks
Boot times!?
I must be the only person who doesn’t care about boot times. I know Vista has an exceptionally long boot time, but I’ve been booting between Ubuntu/XP all day on old sff and even though they do not compare to the instant-on Linux solutions, Neither bothers me.
There are multiple competing projects from a variety of Linux Vendors to increase boot time, and all I find fairly dull. I can think of a hundred features I would rather have in a new OS that I do care about.
You don’t have a netbook, right?
I certainly don’t, but I’ve used several. I’ll stick with one major gripe PRICE I was looking forward to the second generation eee’s and followers being better in every way, and more solid…but it came with a price, one I am unwilling to PAY. How about touchscreen ; GPS; Power saving grayscale for ebooks The list goes on.
but the reality is I’m working on a machine with less oomph than any netbook on the market right now
Edited 2009-02-02 01:50 UTC
The only people who don’t care about boot times are those running just a single OS on their machine that doesn’t either hang or require reboots on software installation (those two conditions rule out most Windows users then!).
I suspect that of the rest (Mac OS X and Linux users), a fair chunk of people either dual boot or use virtualisation – probably mainly to run Windows apps, especially games. Hence, despite your grumpy post about not caring about boot times, they *are* important for a lot of users.
For example, I have a quad core Dell Vostro with 4GB RAM and the very fast Samsung 1TB drives, but Fedora 8 with VirtualBox, VMWare Server or Qemu installed takes quite a while to boot up (45 seconds is not uncommon). And, yes, I’ve trimmed as much as I can out of the startup sequence.
Trying out Fedora 10 shows a *massive* improvement in startup time (under 30 seconds now) and it makes dual booting far less of a chore than it used to be with Fedora 8, especially when Vista Ultimate’s boot performance is dismal – I hate the 30 seconds *after* your desktop appears before the machine is usuable, assuming you’ve installed anti-virus, daemon tools and ATI’s 3D driver.
Still, all this talk of fast boot times reminds me of 80’s (non-IBM PC compatible) machines where most or all of the OS was on ROM and you’d be talking a few seconds after power on to complete the boot sequence. Of course, you’d be “stuck” with the same OS on ROM for years (if you’re lucky, some machines had upgradable ROMs – Acorn’s BBC Micro and Archimedes probably being the most obvious), but that encouraged generally better OS coding (and a lot more testing I suspect) than the bug-riddled stuff we see today.
Even after zealots like Bill Gates leading his “Jihad†against Linux. Its nice to see Investments from Intel into Linux..and its a good choice.
I spent more money on hardware as a Linux user, and increasingly everything is Intel, and those I advise as a computer professional the choice is again Intel.
Although I’m surprised they we do not see more investment from intel. They must feel incredibly constrained by Microsoft, as must many hardware vendors
I love XFCE and I know its going to be replaced by clutter, but I’m posting this from a machine with less beef in every area than any nettop. I cannot but think this is a sensible response to the Ubuntu+ARM collaboration. Can we expect disposable portable Internet soon.
I on one level do not care about the Desktop, but the kernel which would mean any distribution will work on the hardware, but it intrigues me to think that for Intel to put its toes into the OS market, Microsofts Dominance has never looked shakier, and has no modern OS beta or otherwise that can compete with Linux.
There is a massive portable computing space left to exploit in the sub £100 or even £200 left after the first eee oddly the thing that made it successful, I find the new netbooks too expensive for my tastes, and paying Microsoft so I can use Firefox and OpenOffice leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Everybody is looking at this market, and even those who had thought it only for smartphones are seeing the potential.