Thursday, May 21, 2009

Testing Moblin V2 Beta for Netbooks


Click to see the video





Yeah.. It's beta... but Intel is the worlds largest Linux house if you count the devs.. and they have been doing this over 2 years..







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18 comments:

HeartBeat said...

Sorry this is not related but I always wanted to ask you the following questions:

1- We are learning a lot from you and your blog and I think lot of us would whish to communicate with you and with others through a Forum on your site. Is that possible? I wish

2- what is your favourate Gadgets Bag that you use when you travel having your UMPC, Netbook, Digital Camera, Extra Battery etc ..

3- and this is a bit technical :) can you show us the usb pins of the mini PCIe of the Viliv S5 plz.

See if you had a forum I would have posted here :P

HeartBeat said...

and oh, Great Video Thank you.

TheWalt said...

Thanks for the demo, saved me some time testing.

The interface designers seem to be working hard as it looks pretty, but the usability department must have been on holiday.

Hopefully some of the major issues will be addressed in future updates.

squirrel said...

JKK, does this "browser" have Flash or Java?

Saperalot said...

good video as always. thanks for that.

i think there is a lot of work to do to bring the os to final version. now, i will name it alpha cause this is not a beta version. but the ideas behind this are good, the conversion is not that good.

some easy things can be hard to do sometimes, right? ;-)

Grindboy said...

Thanks for this review JKK I was going to spend some time trying to hack Moblin onto my Non-atom eeepc 900 but now I think I'll stick with Ubuntu NBR!

Anonymous said...

I think "usability" is the keyword here and by the looks of it Moblin has a long long way to go

Nice review JKK

-Jim

Anonymous said...

thanks great vid ... now I know I dont have to download it :D btw 22:02 "no no no no no yeah" best party of the vid XD

OlivierSeres said...

Congrats for this video, jkk.
Totally agreeing with your remarks about trickyness of the differents apps, TheWalt perfectly summit up : "usability dept must have been on holiday". while design is nice. In fact Apple should lend some ergonomists to Intel for a few weeks, in return of a discount on chipsets ;-)
Moblin2 is not ready to use, seem Intel project leader had some pression from his management to release something.
Moblin is missing a webmail.
special wish @jkk : could you shoot reviews under 10mn ?

Anonymous said...

JKK reviewed moblin as if it were a final release when in fact its an early beta to give testers a taste of what is to come, most of the issues he complained about with the browser are known issues and features that are yet to be implemented on the browser. I was in the moblin IRC and was told by the developers that the settings and many features for the browser narrowly missed the beta release, so the devs are working to make this better and much more polished for the final release. The way open source works is if you have a problem try and play your part by filing a bug or making a feature request .. here http://moblin.org/community

@OlivierSeres You are just kind of person i pray never uses Free and opensource software, because rather than make meaningful and constructive criticism all you will sit in your chair and run down tireless effort or people working hard to built a software that is free of cost for people to give them an alternative.


TheWalt perfectly summit up : "usability dept must have been on holiday"

The devs are working really hard to improve the quality of moblin, perhaps you could spend some time with them in the Moblin IRC to suggest improvement and make your observations (something you will never be able to do with the Apple usability team.) Moblin is still very early in its development stage and unless you intend to report bugs or upload patches and fixes.. you are advised not to run it for everyday work.

Anonymous said...

About the touch screen support i asked the devs in the IRC About this and here was my reply

19:01 < bigbrova1> does moblin support touch screen .. if no are there plans to
add touch screen support?
19:02 < arjan> bigbrova1: we have it workign on some touch screens
19:02 < arjan> the hard part with touch screens is the drivers
19:03 < arjan> there's a gazillion of those, of varying quality

again you can not just expect moblin to work on just any type of hardware.. especially one that uses closed source driver which has no linux support.

Unknown said...

Congrats for this video, jkk.
Totally agreeing with your remarks about trickyness of the differents apps, TheWalt perfectly summit up : "usability dept must have been on holiday". while design is nice. In fact Apple should lend some ergonomists to Intel for a few weeks, in return of a discount on chipsets
Berkey Filters

OlivierSeres said...

@bigbrovar : sorry i cannot let you say this. I just talked with a friend of mine who was working at Intel dealing with OSS. If his information is right (which i'm confident on) Moblin 2 has been 100% financed by Intel, and manpower wasn't free of cost : developpers were employees. Intel just left the project to the Linux Foundation in April for some reasons (better target OSS community ?) but it's not within a month that you can improve a software like moblin. Conclusion : Moblin 2 is 100% financed and our opinion was aimed to a work sponsored for 2 year with a big player who has big interest in pushing netbook usage. Nothing else.

Anonymous said...

@OlivierSeres Never said Moblin the people working on Moblin were non paying developers. My point is that these people (include Intel) are working to develop a platform target at netbooks which would not only be be free as in open source and free of cost but would also bring much needed speed and UI enhancement that a netbooks OS should have (currently all the OS running on a netbooks OS built to run on desktop/laptop computer)



Sure Moblin as been 2 year in development, but if you followed the project from the start you will notice that most of the technology that Moblin uses were built from scratch stuffs like clutter , KMS, Empathy, pulse audio, conman, its not never easy building a platform from ground up. but i think the Moblin team have done a Fabulous job, first most of the work on Moblin concentrated on under the hood stuffs having the right base to build on (they started by using an Ubuntu kernel then moved to fedora) then the next stage was getting the under the hood stuff worked out. things like an optimised kernel for the atom processor, shorter boot time doing this period Moblin used XFCE as its UI base.



Once the under the hood stuff became matured it was time to concentrate on the Moblin UI which is what this Beta is all about. This is the first development release of Moblin that features this UI. I talk to the Moblin dev everyday on their IRC and beside being very friendly there admit that the UI is a work in progress and still very alpha in its development, most of the features are yet to be implemented. Moblin as it is now is only a technology preview. the release is targeted at Developers and beta tester who want to run it and contribute patches, file bugs, and make feature request and suggestions.



Moblin is trying to achive what has not be done before create a platform meant just for netbooks and MID devices Butchering it in its infancy is no way contributory to the development of Moblin

OlivierSeres said...

@bigbrovar thanks for this detailed comments. In fact, The "kinda commercial launch with all the videos surely made us think it was ready to use.
Even if jkk,some others, myself raise some issues of usability (and its not because its OSS one's cannot give its opinion and deserve to be called butchers if so) i'm sure everyone thinks Moblin is a promising project and appreciate the smart ideas in it.

Phillomath said...

@bigbrovar I would also like to thank you for your comments, I think I gained more insight to the status and future of the moblin platform from you than I did from the video.
No offence JKK, I greatly appreciate the information you provide and its great to know how its performing on different devices. When dealing with something that is still obviously a work in progress it would be nice to focus on the intent as well as the current implementation. I definitely came away with the impression from this video that you thought this was a project not worth following to completion, a sentiment I feel is unjustified.

Anonymous said...

thank you JKK for the video.

Anonymous said...

another great review!
the robotic voice of jkk perfectly fits the narative

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