SGLNX

Moblin has recently announced its version 2.1 of the project for download.

At SGLNX, armed with a first generation ITX Intel Atom 230 mainboard and a MSI Wind U100-Plus N280 netbook, the live USB image was tested on the 2 hardwares and an attempt to do a full install was also done on another USB stick.

This second USB stick was used to boot this “natively installed Moblin” to test the portability of the Moblin operating system across different hardwares.

Downloading and make a live image drive on a USB stick was easy. Instructions were clear and simple and caters for Windows/Linux/OSX users with guides on how to write the IMG file to the usb thumbdrive.

Booting the Moblin live image on USB was surprisingly fast on the MSI Wind netbook. It booted faster than a Ubuntu Live CD on USB thumbdrive (created with Unetbootin). It took 14 seconds for the desktop background to appear and 55 seconds for the “clutter” user interface to be fully functional. On the ITX Atom 230 reference mainboard, it took just 13 seconds and 27 seconds for the background to appear and for the user interface to be functional respectively.

For the standards of booting a live image off a USB drive comparing with other distros’ live images, Moblin beats most other distros hands down.

The user interface of the Moblin live image was easy to use. Moving the mouse pointer to the top brings out a hidden top tab with various common tasks and status such as the web browser, wifi settings, bluetooth settings, messaging and Moblin introduce a term in it OS known as “Zones”.

Basically zones are merely applications that are still open. At the zone page, users will be able to quick switch to their preferred applications still running in the background. ( i.e. a static page showing open applications much like an “alt-tab”).

The user interface itself comes with little icon animation and with the light bluish theme, makes the Moblin desktop very comfortable for the eye. It is easy to navigate and the outlook of the theme and clutter UI makes the overall appearance kiddy friendly.

Almost too unsophisticated and juvenile even as an operating system. Perhaps, it was designed to be that way since it is originally meant for the lightweight Intel Atom processor.

Hardware detection was a breeze as the kernel used in Moblin 2.1 was 2.6.31 and it detected the wireless card embedded in the MSI-Wind netbook. However, it was not able to allow the embedded bluetooth to be turned on via the “Fn-F11″ key combination.  No apparent issues with the Intel GMA950 integrated graphics as the user interfaces loaded with nifty animation without any lag with the niceties of the Clutter interface. Jkontherun.com has a nice video of the user interface below.

More on installation of Moblin on USB removable media as a primary OS instead of live image on the next post.
Click here to proceed to Part 2: SGLNX takes Moblin 2.1 for a spin

Tags: atom, Distro, intel, ITX, Kernel, live, Live CD, LiveCD, moblin, netbook, Nettop, opensource, operating system, usb

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 16:15 and is filed under Distro, Hardware, ITX, Kernel, Moblin, Netbook, Nettop, Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.