So, Mobiln is now focusing on netbooks. It’s a huge setback for MIDs to learn that Moblin for MIDs won’t be ready until 2010 but clearly there’s a business case there to focus on netbooks first. I tried the build briefly on a Medion Akoya Mini and here’s what happened…
The main reason that there is so much memory being used is that when you boot from the CD, it stores nothing on your hard drive; all of the things that it stores are on your RAM. If you really want to try out an OS, you should probably install it onto a hard drive first
Yup. I mentioned that in the video. You obviously didnt watch it all ;-)
this moblin is so nonsense… why bothering if there are GNU/Linux distros out there which work way better and work already NOW!! moblin is dead…long live ubuntu and others.
oh forgot…in april ubuntu 9.04 will be out. who cares about moblin on netbooks…cheers
The areas where Moblin may have an advantage is in power optimisations and software distribution.
Obviously intel will have an advantage with their skills as it’s their hardware and they have a lot more engineers than anyone else.
It’s also possible they build a 3rd-party application channel which would then work on all Moblin-based builds. Obviously an advantage for devs as they can then write programs which can easily be distributed to millions of PCs.
Steve
Exactly, Ubuntu is not power efficient. I tried Ubuntu Eee 8.04.1 on my then-current Eee 900A and got about three hours of very light surfing. After installing Windows XP I got four. Needless to say I’m not using Ubuntu on my Eee 901 Go. In all fairness the times should be closer the heavier the use is, but computers are often idle.
The trouble with different distros is their separate software library and package management. Moblin will need to offer all the basic software at least and *keep* their repositories up to date! They need to mirror the effort of the competing distros at least for the parts that their target audience requires. If everything they need works, they won’t consider a different distro.
This is rubbish, I was hoping for moblin to finally become a nice linux distro with a small foot print and a mobile interface. They have turned it into just another linux distro, maybe it has the small footprint butthe same interface that you can get anywhere. I guess we are left waiting till 2010 for new MID to be produced maybe then they will actually sell soem of them in the USA.
Moblin is not a distro, instead being more akin to Google’s Android. It’s up to organizations other than Intel to make it into a complete system.
The XFCE interface slapped onto the current alpha release is just being used as an example. Gnome, KDE, etc., could all theoretically used by the Moblin framework.
In regards to the video, “Minefield” looks like “Firefox” because it is “Firefox”. Development builds are always labeled “Minefield.” Hey, Moblin is in Alpha, so why not use a beta web browser? Afterall, it is supposed to be a sneak-peak at the future.
You are probably not using 600 megs of RAM. “Top” lumps cached and actual RAM together. More than likely the actual usage is at 300 megs, which still seems a bit large, but oh well.
As i mentioned in the vid, its probably running ramdisk so ignore the footprint in the video.
Thanks for the Minefied tip. I checked it out afterwards and was slightly embarrased to find out it was FF!
Steve
You misunderstand. Linux has three types of RAM usage: normal, buffers, and cached. Even without a RAM disk “top” will show combined usage, and therefore making Linux appear to be a memory hog.
Here’s some light reading:
http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/Linux%20Memory%20Management.htm
http://techtips.chanduonline.com/2006/08/11/linux-uses-too-much-memory-a-very-basic-linux-memory-guide/
Moblin is looking very good indeed: boots quickly- alpha in less time than a very highly optimized Debian system of mine, and far faster than XP or
Ubuntu. Not bad for a preview of software that SAYS it is not ready for use yet.
For those who speak of Ubuntu- sorry folks, but anything posted by a Ubuntu-phile must be taken with a grain of salt: while it is not exactly a bad distro IMO, I have yet to see an instance where it is not thoroughly outclassed by distros like Debian, Mepis, Gentoo or even Fedora.
Ubuntu more accurately fits in with efforts like Xandros and Linspire.
Kudos to the Moblin devs, and keep up the good work!
(I just hope they make it possible for power users to install source and such without too much difficulty!)