Moblin netbook OS

Moblin is an optimized Linux platform that provides a modern, engaging user experience for mobile devices, such as netbooks, MIDs, and IVI systems. Moblin has a common core of Application and User Interface services and APIs, which provide application developers a rich and consistent development environment across multiple device form factors.

The Moblin project started out in life as an operating system targeted at the Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform but has morphed into a prime candidate for the Netbook world. With the release of the Moblin v2 beta came the push specifically targeted at Netbooks designed around the Intel Atom processor family. A transition of project stewardship from Intel to the Linux Foundation also took place between the releases of Moblin v1 and v2.

Installation:
Getting moblin install is very simple. The Moblin site (moblin.org) has a link to download the latest image and instructions on how to burn the image to a USB stick for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Once that’s done you must configure your Netbook to boot from USB. Then all you have to do is select the USB key.

Boot Time:
Boot time has changed, though it’s almost 25 seconds(for me) and nowhere near their goal of sub-10 seconds.

Smaller Screen and Toolbar:

Moblin uses a toolbar at the top of the screen to present different options. Default selections include m_zone, status, people, internet, media, pasteboard, applications and zones. There are also toolbar items for power and brightness, volume and networks. Current time and date are displayed on the left-hand side of the toolbar.

Several of the toolbar items present you with a faster way to complete a task like set your Twitter status. The people item displays all your online contacts from your instant messenger accounts. Each toolbar item uses a similar approach to presentation with a text box to either enter information or search for something. Clicking on the internet toolbar icon brings up a single textbox prompting you for a URL. When you click on the media icon you’ll see a list of existing media and a search box to quickly find a specific media file.

Moblin uses a concept called the m_zone or myzone as the launch / landing page to help you navigate to where you need to be. The m_zone page is broken up into three areas for recent activities, recent files and websites, and recent social network updates. Moblin 2.0 directly supports Twitter and Last.fm as the primary social network sites in this release.

Software:
Copy and paste was never easier with a tool called the Pasteboard. To use Pasteboard you simply highlight the text you wish to copy and press Control-C on the keyboard. This places the text in the copied data area at the top of the list. You can then copy any of the fragments and paste them into another application of your choice. You can clear the entire pasteboard with a single button click or remove a single item by clicking on the X beside it.

Web browsing uses a Mozilla-based browser with a clutter shell. One of the things missing in the browser is a setup / configuration tool. The beta is also missing the flash plugin but it only takes two command line instructions to install it. From the Moblin Known Issues page you simply command:
$ yum install flash-plugin

Conclusion:
This release of Moblin shows lots of promise and definitely shines in the user interface department. The clutter-based shell and applications work well on the smaller Netbook screen. Boot times are faster than other netbook os and show that moblin has spent a considerable amount of time optimizing.

The good news is that this beta version seems to be pretty stable and works right out of the box on a good number of Netbooks. So far, i’m liking it pretty much.

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