Moblin, the much-hyped Linux-based OS from Intel and the Linux Foundation, released its version 2.1 in November 2009. This is a clean, visually appealing OS aimed at nettop and netbook users, with a desktop model that's far removed from traditional OS. Reflecting its Intel roots, the Moblin 2.1 OS is limited to SSSE3-enabled CPUs, currently the Atom and Core 2 families. Users with GMA500, ATI and Nvidia graphics are also out of luck with the OS. Despite being narrowly targeted at Intel-based netbooks, Moblin is showing signs of actually gaining some market traction, albeit slowly. In mid-2009, Canonical announced a one-off respin of the RPM-based Moblin which Dell ships integrated in a $254 Mini 10v as the “Ubuntu Moblin Remix Developer Edition”. Novell offers the Moblin v2 GUI running over Open SUSE. The SUSE/Moblin GUI combination has has attracted OEM interest from MSI, which announced at CES2010 that it will ship with its U135 in February 2010, and Samsung. Other companies reportedly dipping a toe in the Moblin waters include Acer, Mandriva, Linpus, Xandros, and Fluendo. I used the “pure” Moblin 2.1 OS from the moblin.org website. The site warns that the Moblin live image file requires stringent “byte-copying” to work correctly on USB media. My experience trying to make it work with a 2GB thumb drive bore this out – it was indeed fussy. My first attempt was foiled by a recalcitrant thumb drive with S3 software that survived the installation process, preventing anything from running. Try two ended with an initramfs /init error which the Moblin site identified as stemming from having written the live image to a mounted thumb drive. The third attempt produced an unusually long boot process that ended abruptly with a cryptic symlinks error. For the fourth try, I downloaded a new image file to a Windows Vista machine and used the Moblin-recommended W32diskimager.exe program to set up the flash drive. Ironically, the Vista route was not just the easiest, but worked perfectly the first time. The "MyZone" panel.My test machine was an Acer AS1410 with an Intel Core Solo SU3500 CPU, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, GMA4500 integrated graphics and Intel 5100 a/b/g/n wireless. I ran a live session from a USB flash drive, and was pleasantly surprised by the under 30 second boot. The OS had no trouble with my hardware, and was also able to seamlessly recognize and log into my home wireless network, 802.11N on a Linksys WRT610N V1. The OS recognized my wireless-enabled printer, an HP C4380. I did not use Moblin's installer.Somewhere, a cellphone is missing some icons.The Moblin desktop is spare and clean. The cutsey animal motif is not an OS-wide theme, thankfully, although it made me wonder if Moblin came with its own Fail Whale. The upper right-hand corner of the menu bar houses icons that access Moblin's built-in Bluetooth, Power, Sound and Networking management applications. All are pleasant and easy to navigate. The cryptic icons across the middle and left of the bar take a little more digging into, but the underlying screens are mostly intuitive and easy to use. The bar itself rolls up and down in response to mouse input, and the default desktop wallpaper is a pleasant modernistic blue. Mine goes to 11! The ultimate in uncluttered desktops?Moblin uses a modified tabbed metaphor across the OS, called “panels”, with some twists that take a little getting used to. One interesting innovation is the use of “Zones” to display open applications and windows. These are accessed through their icon, or the standard Alt-Tab keyboard combination. In this view, semi-thumbnails are being displayed of the a photo of the author from Cheese, and the media page. Moblin automatically adds recent content to the relevant Zone of the OS, making it easy to find what you're working on again. Your humble author and another open window.The OS uses a Mozilla-based internet browser with a redesigned user interface. It is Flash enabled out of the box. The browser also makes Firefox extensions and additions available through the familiar route. Audio and video quality in Pandora and You Tube were both excellent. I tried Moblin's built-in media player with its default demonstration presentation, which ran smoothly in full-screen. Like the rest of Moblin, the UI was usable but minimalistic. I tried plugging in an exernal CD/DVD drive to see how Moblin handled multimedia that didn't come from the internet. Interestingly, the OS refused to mount the audio CD I tried, but it recognized and wanted to play a video DVD. Moblin is intended to integrate the user's social and Web-based working and playing habits, and has some interesting tools to that end. The “MyZones” page is intended to be a hub for social networking, but the OS also has a surprisingly painless tool for integrating other online services. I set up a web email account using Moblin's Synch feature, and found it painless.I entered my account information, and Moblin took care of setting up its email client automatically. Within a minute or so, I was viewing emails. I had a few problems with HTML mail rendering correctly in the email client, but it was easy to move to a browser window.I had few complaints with the Moblin test drive. In general, everything worked smoothly and the UI took very little time to get used to. One issue that might be a problem for users in a multi-distro environment is that Moblin does not support Ext 4 file systems. I ran the update function as a test, and got a scattering of error messages there as well. These were the exception to anotherwise painless rule.Uh, thanks for the 411...or not...Moblin's update process will be familiar to anyone used to Linux. According to the documentation, it is an RPM-based system. The repositories are user-configurable; the default selection is conservative. Another neat Moblin feature is the simplified add/remove process for pre-selected software packages. My only complaint there was that the only word processor selection was Abiword, and there was no Open Office option that I could find. Using the system was a snap, and the selection of a few dozen programs will cover the bases for most casual users. File management and other utilities are well represented. The default file manager is Nautilus, making for a snappy transition for experienced users. The default selection of games, applications and tools is enough to get most users up and running; a wide range of others are just a click or two away.Conclusions: I liked Moblin quite a bit. It was easy to use and generally intuitive. I didn't try to customize it very much, but look forward to a long-term test drive on my laptop to see how flexible it is in extended everyday use. The project has a lot of potential to improve Linux's reputation in terms of usability and polish, and has already attracted corporate sponsors who could put badly-needed marketing muscle behind it.
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