Guest post by The world’s third-largest PC vendor plans to roll out Moblin Linux across a range of machines, including its Aspire One nettops, as well as regular laptop and desktop PCs, the company announced at Computex in Taipei. A number of netbooks running several different versions of Moblin were also on display at Computex, including Suse Moblin, Xandros Moblin, Linpus Moblin, Red Flag Moblin and Ubuntu Moblin running on netbooks from Hewlett-Packard, Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International, and Hasee Computer.
I thought Moblin was a discrete distribution: I’m not sure how “Xandros Moblin” or “Suse Moblin” etc. makes sense; that impression was re-enforced by wandering through moblin.org for twenty seconds. While moblin.org never uses the word “distribution” that I saw, the thing they describe sounds like a complete, discrete operating system, not something that would be included as a component of an existing Linux distribution.
Is the problem here with the information in the linked/abridged article, or with my understanding of what Moblin is?
From what understand it is the technical basis to which distributions can base their customised and branded version of Linux on – it also provides the opportunity for OEM’s to brand their Linux version as a unique experience for their users rather than it being yet another linux netbook. Basically it is what was attempted by UnitedLinux but dedicated for Netbooks. I hope that this idea is actually expanded upon and we see in the future a notebook/laptop version as well to bring so coherency to the distributions.
PS: The WAP wesbite is broken, I tried to send this via my mobile phone, however, it ended up complaining that I needed to put my login/password – which I did. I guess the WAP site is dead or deprecated.
see below:
http://moblin.org/documentation/moblin-overview
it looks like it’s intended to be further customized. while that particular page isn’t too specific, i don’t think there’s any question (as far as intel is concerned) that other companies are going to further tailor moblin.
that being said, acer also just announced that they’d be shipping android-based netbooks later this year.
i find that… errr… strange. i mean, strange that they’re shipping two entirely different linux-based OSes. it *could* prove confusing to customers.
i readily acknowledge that i don’t really have a full grasp on their “big picture”, so maybe their roadmap will become a lot more clear in the coming days/weeks/months/whatever. maybe they just plan on doing android for units sold/subsidized by wireless carriers.
Isn’t Moblin basically a fedora with some new pieces of software stuck all over it?
Maybe they’ll skip some parts of the moblin core, but adding the clutter interface and the apps to say Suse, you’d have kind of a “moblinized” Suse.
Anyway, there’s already a Moblin repository for Suse so it’d be a matter of checking what’s in there.
OK, but what about us poor saps who got stuck with Linpus on the AAOne? Will Acer give us an official option to upgrade? Moblin 2.0 Alpha sucked on the Aspire One, by the way. Since I installed Ubuntu NBR I haven’t looked back and I actually enjoy using the One once in a while now.
I’ve got an AOA150-1570 (120GB HDD 1GB RAM), and have run the Moblin beta off a live USB stick. It doesn’t do xD cards; it doesn’t even recognize hot-plugged SD cards. Maybe it works better on the D-series netbooks. At least Linpus worked with all the hardware.
Good thing this is sill a BETA we’re talking about, right?
Beta works great on the AAO.
Some things would still use some polish (others are just far from being finished, eg. the media player or the default browser), but all the hardware works and it’s quite fast.
Is Acer seeking a further discount from Microsoft?
Linux problem has perrenially been lack of hardware support and lack of appropriate niche software.
If you just want an internet, email experience — we have cell phones for that. Linux will do well there, but not on desktops.
And p2p, office, watching videos, listening music, reading ebooks, watching your holiday photos, ssh (-X) to your servers at work…
There aren’t that many “niche apps” that would fit a netbook and are lacking on linux.
And when it comes to hardware support you would expect the OEM to get all your hardware running out of the box.
Please PLEASE Acer scrap the name!!!! Every time I see it I just see “pus” as in the gross stuff that comes out of wounds…..
Linpus is the name of the company and the distro. Acer has nothing to do with it. I was using Linpus when they first started in Taiwan back in the 1990s.
Ah, I see… well then, I guess I can’t complain too much…