What is Moblin
Moblin is a major initiative launched by Intel targeting the netbook market. Intel is the upstream and has developed some very appealing code for Moblin and it has gathered lots of momentum in the market. Moblin is not a distribution itself (but does have a reference implementation based on Fedora), but instead relies on OSV's (like Canonical and others) to support, package and ship Moblin on their distributions. So Canonical decided to release a version of Moblin running on Ubuntu (Ubuntu Moblin Remix) such that we could give users the freedom to try out Moblin on our great platform that they know and love
What is Ubuntu Moblin Remix
- Moblin 2.1 preview release running on Ubuntu 9.10
- Developer focused, as based on an "preview" (i.e. not final) version of Moblin
- Moblin's rpms were converted to debian packages
Some packages in made it to "universe" for Karmic, others in PPA https://edge.launchpad.net/~moblin/+archive/ppa
Ubuntu Moblin Remix image available for download here: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-moblin-remix/releases/karmic/release/ubuntu-moblin-remix-9.10-moblin-remix-i386.iso
Bug tracking: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu-moblin-remix
Ubuntu Forums for Moblin: http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=376
Overview of Moblin UI and Components
Moblin toolbar
- My Zone- main home screen. Sections for calendar entries, favorites, recent docs, tweats from twitter, other social media information
- Status - user's online/offline status for various social media sites
- People - user's friends from Empathy
- Internet - quick launch of url's, shows thumbnails of open tabs and pinned web pages
- Media - quick launch/search of recently opened media files, playqueue display
- Pasteboard - visual paste board
- Applications - launcher for applications, shown by category, searchable
- Zones - zone switcher shows active windows in all the zones (equivalent to workspaces)
- Web Services - this panel is where the user configures specific information for enabled web services.
Status Area
- Power - battery life monitor
- Sound - volume adjustment and display
- Network - Networking UI (carrick), talks to Connman backend, support for wired, wifi, 3G and wimax
Applications
- Moblin Web Browser - uses mozembed with clutter wrapper (clutter-mozembed), moving to Firefox 3.5 in Moblin 2.1
- Moblin Media Player - clutter based media player, talks to gstreamer back-end
Other major components
- Mutter - clutter enabled window manager, Moblin Toolbar is a mutter plugin
- mojito - daemon and API for social networking
- bognor-regis - media playback daemon
- bickley - media meta-data engine
How are Ubuntu Moblin Remix and Ubuntu Netbook Remix different?
Ubuntu Netbook Remix was developed by Canonical well before Moblin. Canonical continues to develop and support UNR going forward. We are testing and supporting many hardware models out of the box with UNR and will continue to develop UNR past Karmic. UNR is quite popular, intuitive and well integrated in our platform.
- UNR is well integrated with the Ubuntu platform (gnome, Ubuntu One, notifications, etc..)
- UNR user interface is straight forward, simple to use
- UNR has been shipping commercially for over 1 year, it's well tested and proven
What vendors are shipping Ubuntu Moblin?
- Dell Mini 10v, 9.04 based Moblin
Available for download here: http://en.community.dell.com/wikis/linux/ubuntu-9-04-moblin-remix-developer-edition.aspx
How do I get more information about Moblin?
Intel upstream for Moblin http://www.moblin.org
Bugtracking http://bugzilla.moblin.org
- #moblin on freenode