Moblin: Thoughts? Joys? Despairs?

[KeithZG]

I've been trying out the Moblin V2 beta from a USB stick on my Acer Aspire One, and soon I'll be backing it up and installing Moblin on it wholesale to give it a real spin. I was wondering, does anyone else have anything to say about it? Personally I think it's snazzy to the extreme, with a nice percentage of that snazziness actually being quite practical (like integrating some social networking logins as global settings).

So far there's two main things I notice about it:

(1) In many ways the entire environment seems like it uses much the same paradigm as Kontact, which is really good for a netbook I think (and as much as I love Kontact---which is a LOT---it's a bit too heavyweight to go full-out with on a normal netbook).

(2) It's Fedora-derived but seems to be apart from any specific release, and thus is also RPM-based.... fears of breakage and dependency hell haunt my dreams

I'm sick of Linpus Lite yet for how I use that netbook it really needs to be able to boot up absurdly fast, so I'm gonna give Moblin a spin

[The Liquidator]

Re: Moblin: Thoughts? Joys? Despairs?

Have you looked at ubuntu network remix, which works well on the aspire one?

[KeithZG]

Re: Moblin: Thoughts? Joys? Despairs?

Have you looked at ubuntu network remix, which works well on the aspire one?

Oh, I've definitely looked into it. However, if it came down to using something *buntu on my laptop I'd probably just load up a KDE3 image with unetbootin, which I have in fact installed on a friend's Aspire One (one of the 160GB hard drive ones; mine is a 16GB SSD model). If I'm going to run a full traditional DE I'd rather run KDE3 instead of Gnome with a flash frontend, to be blunt. Among other things the default apps are all the opposite of what I'd rather use (I prefer Kopete to Pidgin, for example).

More importantly, (and why I'm not just going the KDE3+Jaunty route), the way I use my netbook is almost like flipping open a book, or a cellphone. If it isn't turning on nearly instantaneously (which the original Linpus Lite install on the Aspire One does; it's literally less than 10 seconds from power on to the desktop, albeit a bit more to load the networking and such) then it's a step backwards for me.

Jaunty has certainly lived up to its name and sped *buntu up, but it's not nearly there yet. Furthermore, as I noted above, Moblin's DE incorporates a lot of integration stuff for social networking and communication, whereas for much of that stuff in *buntu land I'd have to either install KDE4 (ie. for widgets and such) or be running Kontact. Both of those options are a fair bit too heavy for a computer that's low-spec'd but needs to be quick as a wink. Moblin seems to do that, it even boots in around ~40s from my incredibly slow old 2GB USB drive, and the desktop remains quite responsive.

[The Liquidator]

Re: Moblin: Thoughts? Joys? Despairs?

We clearly want the same equipment to do different things ; - isn't it great that we have the choice!

I recently bought my wife an aspire one (8+8 SSD) as her first computer, so my take on it is a bit different. The thing about it being her first computer meant she did not have to un-learn XP.

I agree with you about Linpus - it certainly boots up and shuts down quickly - she found it very easy to use although my personal perception of it was it was sluggish and, well,....... old. I mean, fancy shipping it with Firefox 2 and Openoffice 2.3 I felt the interface looked a bit Fisher Price as well. That's a personal view and I can't help wondering whether that, in itself, was an obstacle to the success of the Linux netbook as a concept.

By comparison, From a USB Pendrive 9.04 UNR took longer to load (although less than kubuntu on my Dell Laptop and I suspect way less than an XP netbook) but was way, way quicker in operation (5 seconds to load OOowriter 3) and the installed version does it in 6. I thought the interface was a class piece of work. In particular the favourites pane (and the fact that you can put your firefox bookmarks straight onto it) was a masterstroke. I defy anyone to try it and then say XP is easy.

For the future, I understand that Canonical is one of the parties working with Intel on the Moblin project so I guess we might be in for exciting times!

Ian

[KeithZG]

Re: Moblin: Thoughts? Joys? Despairs?

I agree with you about Linpus - it certainly boots up and shuts down quickly - she found it very easy to use although my personal perception of it was it was sluggish and, well,....... old. I mean, fancy shipping it with Firefox 2 and Openoffice 2.3 I felt the interface looked a bit Fisher Price as well. That's a personal view and I can't help wondering whether that, in itself, was an obstacle to the success of the Linux netbook as a concept.

Actually I don't at all disagree with you about the points against the Linpus install on the AA1s. In fact one of the first things I did for a friend when she got one (having never using Linux before) was quickly do the (very very simple) hack to permanently switch it to a normal XFCE desktop instead of the Linpus launcher, which for functionality is a rather minor change, maybe even a slight downgrade, but made her feel a lot more like she was using an actual computer.

The EeePC's customized Xandros interface was even worse, since it wasn't laid out quite as well as the Linpus one and used icons that were faaaaaaaar more Fisher Price. That and it tended to be buggy, which is not a great way to introduce people to Linux I definitely wish that the Netbook Remix interface had been there back then, or even just plain Gnome, KDE or XFCE.

Having worked at a generic retail store at the time, I know firsthand that many people were turned off. On the one hand, it WAS set up so that it was easy to use, at least off the bat. But being so locked down (it's quite difficult to install things to the default distro on the EeePC, especially compared to the ease at which Debian-based distros usually operate) and looking so much like a toy in the UI it gave people the impression that Linux was for people who weren't really looking to do much with their computers. I'm not fan of Dell, but in the context of Netbooks they definitely did a much better service in the end to Linux than ASUS did.

The antiquated nature of the installed apps is kindof fated; there's a reason that us here use Linux, no? It's not just the core OS that's better, it's the entire development and distribution model; big companies lag behind.

Still, the boot time really mattered to me (especially since i have a very good desktop machine, quite a few backup desktops, and a 13" laptop which is actually how I'm typing this right now). Certainly back in 8.04 and 8.10 the times weren't even comparable! So that was me being a bit stuck.

For the future, I understand that Canonical is one of the parties working with Intel on the Moblin project so I guess we might be in for exciting times!

Yeah, that's actually one of my own . . . hmm, there must be a word for it, you know, "potential future joys". At very least their involvement should mean an implementation of some of the optimizations that the Moblin devs are doing, but the potential is so much more. For example, a Canonical-modified Moblin interface would be pretty great; already it looks much more professional-but-fun than previous Netbook interfaces (with the possible exception of UNR), so to have it a bit "Ubuntu-ized" and have the backend be Debian-based with the Ubuntu repos, well that would just be amazing.

Another source of "potential future joys", especially since we are after all in the Kubuntu forums, is the future KDE 4 netbook interface. I haven't heard much of it in awhile, and it's unlikely to hit in time for 4.3, but folks are definitely working on it: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/04/p...-netbooks.html. Now, I've yet to be convinced of Plasma's necessity for the desktop, but if the bugs get ironed out (plasma crushes my 3-year-old laptop due to memory leaks) the sheer flexibility of the framework bodes pretty well for a potential netbook interface, eh?

[The Liquidator]

Re: Moblin: Thoughts? Joys? Despairs?

The last time my wife worked a computer in earnest, she was a secretary working with Wordperfect 5.1. So she had no hard and fast idea about how a computer should work and once shown a few of the basics she took to it like a duck to water.

Off topic I know but she produced her first ever spreadsheet last night. We then needed to install the printer, an Epson DX4400. Even I was staggered. Connect, plug in, hit the printer icon, note the printer and click OK. The cd install routine for that printer takes a (good?) 15 minutes in Vista. People just don't know these things, do they.

I think what makes the UNR interface work for me is that it strikes the right balance between ease of use and a "proper" computer. It will be very interesting to see how things develop. Let's see, what's likely to work better, something worked from the ground up with that specific architecture in mind, or a stripped down (or crippleware) version of whatever MS is happening to be offering at the time. Much will depend I suppose on how much intel are prepared to commit to the moblin project - and whether they will support it, or simply cut it loose. I do hope its success or otherwise will not simply be down to how much money there is available for the adverts.

[KeithZG]

Re: Moblin: Thoughts? Joys? Despairs?

The cd install routine for that printer takes a (good?) 15 minutes in Vista. People just don't know these things, do they.

Heh. Tonight my roommate and I were fiddling with things, trying to get our HTPC to be able to see shares of any kind from his Vista desktop. It runs great for pulling from my main (Kubuntu 8.04) desktop, and XBMC is great for the projector setup, but no matter what options we tried we couldn't get his Vista machine to let us access files without an issue. Samba wouldn't work, UPnP wouldn't work, even trying to run an SFTP server failed. Every single one of those options takes a few seconds to set up in Linux, among other options that are Linux-only. In Windows it took us a good 15-30min to try each method, not at all counting the time put into figuring out it wasn't going to work.

In the end my roommate decided to call it a night, saying that he figured some time soon he should just install Linux and avoid all this hassle

[KeithZG]

Re: Moblin: Thoughts? Joys? Despairs?

Okay, I installed the latest build of Moblin on my AA1, and it boots FAST. We're talking something like 15 seconds from when I press the power button.

...unfortunately, the functionality is still fairly lacking (twitter integration is limited to just changing your status, the browser hangs if you try to download any files, etc). It's definitely quite polished considering how young it is, but it's not at all polished enough for me.

Time for some experiments in Jaunty + Openbox

[KeithZG]

Re: Moblin: Thoughts? Joys? Despairs?

Okay, I feel like a bit of a tool having three posts in a row in a thread, but considering that this thread is still the second most current one in this child board despite me last posting here two weeks ago I felt like I'm okay here.

Anyways, in the interim this is what I did with my netbook:

{1} Installed from an expert-mode CLI install, choosing a minimal initramfs and grub2.
{2} Once it was done and booted, I apt-get'd (apt-got? ) the kubuntu-desktop metapackage.
{3} Even KDE 4.3 did the "after about half an hour everything slows to a crawl" thing for me, so I installed OpenBox.
{4} Compiled and made my own .deb package for Tint2, installed wicd from the normal Jaunty repos, added that stuff and others (like kmix and yakuake) to Openbox's autorun.sh, then set up KDM-KDE4 to auto-login.
{5} Used KDE's systemsettings to make all the fonts really small in KDE apps, and LXappearance to do the same for GTK and Gnome apps while also telling them to use the QtCurve style.

After all that I'm left with KDE4 apps running in a minimal-but-fancy-looking session that loads almost as fast as Moblin. It doesn't have some of the fancyness of Moblin, but that being said since Moblin only has integration for a few social services and not others (for example it supports twitter and last.fm but not identi.ca or facebook), and unlike wicd or network-manager their networking program doesn't support stuff like WPA2 Enterprise, this modified Kubuntu setup still wins for functionality. Plus it's always scary to stray to far away from apt and .deb's