Moblin 2 First Impressions

nerdyH notes a DesktopLinux.com first look at the alpha of Intel's Moblin 2 toolkit for Linux distributors to create distributions for netbooks and other Atom-based kit. "A lot of notebooks and even netbooks these days run Windows, but also offer a minimalist Linux environment that boots in seconds. Now, with the Intel-sponsored Moblin project's alpha release of Moblin 2 Monday, it looks like insanely fast boots will become a standard feature of full-featured Linux desktops, too. Some of the quick-booting environments out there are enough to give anyone a lasting hatred of Linux. Like those free bicycles that liberal, well-intentioned municipalities release into the wild from time to time, hoping to get drivers out of their cars, fast-boot Linux is probably doing more to harm than help the cause. But pretty soon, even full-featured Linux will boot in seconds. That's because Intel's built some mighty whizzy read-ahead boot technology into Moblin 2."

OpenedHand

[camcorder]

Maybe it's better to note that Intel recently acquired OpenedHand [o-hand.com] and OpenedHand developers joined Intel Open Source Labs in order to work on Moblin platform. This looks like the first fruit of this acquisition.

Re:X windows

[bitMonster]

That should say C preprocessor, I believe.

My experiences

[HRbnjR]

I tried to get Moblin working on my MID.

I couldn't even get the installer to boot (kernel panic).

I filed a bug ( http://bugzilla.moblin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197 [moblin.org] ) which, despite being a critical issue, hasn't had so much as a peep out of a developer yet (after several months).

And just three articles back ( http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/31/1859200 [slashdot.org] ) Slashdot is discussing the "Bloody Mess" that is the Intel Poulsbo driver, which it's worth noting, is provided as part of the Moblin project.

I'm thinking Moblin may need quite some more polish, and that perhaps they may be a little under-staffed?

Re:Mod Parent UP

[ssintercept]

don't know about modding parent up-
but definitely a Public Service Announcement for not shoving things up your ass.
link in parent is NSFW for all you perv's out there.
not for the squeamish either...

My experience

[erikina]

I just have installed and tested the distro with my Acer Aspire One (a supported computer).

(In dot format here is my experience)

• Being only 264MB it was quick to download.
• Transferring to USB was painless, why can't all distros be like this?
• The "Boot and install" menu was broken. Had to use just the "boot" (and double click later to install)
• Install was quick and easy
• Little laptop takes 15 seconds to boot from grub. Which is about half the speed of Ubuntu/Fedora/OpenSUSE
• New network manager worked very well
• Limited software choices, but 98% of the stuff you need
• No proprietary codecs, and not sure how to install (yet)
• Devel version of firefox (which works really well)

8/10 Best distro I've tested so far for my notebood

Re:My experience

[erikina]

Oh, one other thing. When installing you need root password. It's "moblin". I spent 10 minutes trying to find out what it was.

Re:Yeah, I see their point

[tlhIngan]

I have an EEE 1000. Mine must be on the first.

So, I guess that means it's entirely arbitrary.

Note that 16m is the smallest chunk I can partition on my SSD - exactly one block - I only "need" an 8m partition however.

It depends highly on the BIOS. Some BIOSes like their partition tables to be laid out in a paricular format and sorted in a particular way (there is no standard - some fdisk programs do it first-last, others last-first, others sort them beginning-end, etc). Others check to see if the first partition is a particular type (even though it can be in the middle of the disk).

As for the SSD - it's not one block - it's one cylinder. PC partitions are made on cylinder boundaries. A typical block size for MLC NAND flash is 128kB/block (64 pages of 2K each, emulating 4 sectors per page). There are 128 blocks to one cylinder according to how your SSD is reporting its CHS geometry, which I'd guess is */4/32. (It's completely arbitrary how these figures are reported since almost no one uses CHS anymore (and no modern storage device actually has), but it's something that the PC partition table spec calls for, hard drives and SSDs emulate (through CHS to sector translation), and something we're stuck with until BIOSes and Windows start supporting GUID Partition Tables or other formats.

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