Moblin 2.0 Linux goes alpha (again)

Moblin is fine.

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..to see this get somewhere, but no doubt MS has a plan for killing this.

"""

It's definitely going somewhere. One of the major reasons why the numbers of Linux being installed on Netbooks didn't grow with the number of Netbooks being sold is because each Netbook variant also produced their own custom operating system.

Sure the hacked up versions of the Linux desktop that made it's way into various Netbooks were nice to look at and use, but to be really useful users are still going to want to install their own applications and games and whatnot. There is only so much many people you can keep happy with old versions of Firefox and OpenOffice.org.

Advanced users, much to their dismay, found that installing standard Linux distributions required massive amounts of tweaking to properly support their Netbook's hardware.

Look at this way:

You see one of the biggest problems with Linux, in terms of hardware support, isn't that hardware support sucks... it's just that hardware support lags so heavily.

Think about it. The 'proper' way to get new support for hardware in Linux is to go through a process were you submit your patches to the Linux kernel folks on their mailing list. Once you get their attention then you will have to edit your code and resubmit it 3 or 4 more times before it's close enough to a good shape to were they will take it in and introduce it.

And typically, because of trade secrets, support for new hardware doesn't happen until AFTER the hardware is released. This is much less bad then it used to be (once people figured out that Linux developers had no problem with singing NDAs).

But lets assume...

So Asus releases a new Netbook. It requires modifications to the Linux ACPI stuff to support the new variation. It also needs a new driver for the ethernet and a update to the driver for the wireless and webcams.

Alright. In Linux that is easy to do. Hackers have all that stuff working on patched kernels within weeks of the new hardware release.

So after a couple month stay on the in a development branch of the kernel the new code is given the go-ahead to be entered into the mainline branch of the Linux kernel. That takes about 2 months.

However the kernel doesn't do releases every month. Each new kernel version is only released every 3 months, or so.

So that is 2 weeks + 2 months + 3 months release cycle. So we'll assume that so far about 4 months have passed since the new Netbook has released.

But that means that only benefits users that build their own kernels.

For most users they use pre-compiled kernels from their distributions. Ubuntu and Fedora only release new systems every 6 to 8 months.

SOOOOO... Between getting the netbook released and getting new hardware support into distributions means that your looking at about a 4 month to 10 month lag here.

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What this gets you is that:

A. Users can't install new applications on their hacked up Netbook-specific distribution easily.

B. To install new applications they will have to install a different Linux OS. Like Ubuntu... however Ubuntu wont' have hardware support built-in for another 8 months, at least.

What makes it worse is that most people won't know this. They'll try to install their own Linux version if they can get that far (which most won't) and then they'll see about 15 pages of Wiki horseshit that they will have to wade through to get good hardware support again.

Sooooo... this means 'Fuck Linux I am using XP'. People need to get work done.

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With Moblin they will provide all the hardware support for Netbooks out-of-the-box.

They also will provide a build service that ODMs and OEMs can use to build their own 'custom' version of Linux. As a added bonus between making the OEM's life easier and Linux much cheaper to develop the build service will make sure that all the APIs are there and unified for the Moblin platform.

This means that you will have a standardized set of APIs for the Linux netbook folks that will enable users to easily install new applications, which will have top-notch support for all their hardware.

Soo.. Linux + Top notch hardware support + Easy to install Applications and standard API for ISVs to target.

This is exactly the advantages that Windows XP has over Linux on the netbook desktop....

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And even if Moblin dies a flaming death it's improvements to boot performance, drivers, and other things (like GTK CLutter) are being adopted by other distributions as fast as they are being introduced by Moblin.