Moblin 2 Core Alpha

These days it looks like every major Linux distribution is trying to slim down its boot times: a faster boot-up is one of the main goals of Ubuntu 9.04, and so-called 'fastboot' systems such as HyperSpace and Splashtop are becoming mainstream as PC vendors are preinstalling them on mainboards. The Intel-sponsored Moblin project is part of the same evolution. Nevertheless, there's a fundamental difference: while fastboot solutions have minimal functionality and are meant to be used if you would like to read your Gmail account but don't want to wait for Windows booting, Moblin aims to have a full-fledged distribution which boots in seconds.

The unique selling point of the recently released Moblin 2 alpha is clearly the read-ahead boot technology by Intel. The release shows an impressive boot time: on an Acer Aspire One with SSD the Moblin 2 alpha boots in 6 seconds from the GRUB menu to the Xfce desktop (with autologin enabled). Other distributions will surely borrow this technology in the future. For example, the Netbook Edition of Ubuntu 9.10 ("Karmic Koala") will include Moblin's fastboot technology; Linpus and Mandriva are also planning to build on Moblin. In addition, at the beginning of this month, embedded Linux company MontaVista announced a Moblin-based Linux platform, as its competitor Wind River did last year.

The Moblin platform

Moblin 2 alpha is more a technology showcase and a platform, rather than yet another Linux distribution. Moblin 2 is not based on another distribution, but borrows parts from various other distributions, and leans heavily on Fedora by its use of RPM package management and other Fedora tools. The Moblin toolchain comes from openSUSE.

Moblin Core, the heart of the Moblin platform, provides a base that can be shared for platform-specific implementations, such as netbooks, MID's and even in-vehicle systems. It is built on GNOME Mobile and extended with Intel's fastboot and power saving technologies. Intel engineers have also sent patches to Xfce to improve the startup time of the graphical session.

Moblin 2 alpha uses a kernel version named 2.6.29.rc2-13.1.moblin2-netbook. It supports Intel Atom and Intel Core 2 cpu's. Moblin 2 is reported to work on the Acer Aspire One, Asus eeePC 901, Dell Mini 9 and MSI Wind. Your author was delighted to see wireless networking work out-of-the-box on his Acer Aspire One.

Moblin 2 can be tried out easily on a MID or netbook. Just download the Moblin live image, copy it with dd to a USB pen drive and boot from it. If you install Moblin on your netbook's SSD or hard drive, what you get is fairly minimal: the Minefield (the future Firefox 3.5) web browser, the Thunar file manager, the Totem movie player, the Mousepad text editor, the Pimlico suite of PIM applications, a terminal, and some other tools.

The graphical interface is based on the Xfce desktop environment, but, according to Intel, this is a placeholder which will be replaced in the final release. Moblin 2 doesn't use GNOME's Network Manager, instead it uses the Linux Connection Manager, which accounts for the lightweight connman daemon and applet connman-gnome. The project is specifically designed to run on embedded devices with low resources.

Using the alpha version for day-to-day work is not recommended: there are errors floating on VT 1 and many things don't work yet. For example, choosing Quit in the Xfce menu doesn't halt the machine, but restarts X. Because it's an alpha version and because Moblin is more a platform than a distribution, it's not fair to attach too much importance to these errors. Actually, there are only two reasons to use Moblin 2 alpha: to play with the bleeding edge fastboot technology, or to build your own Moblin-based distribution.

Build your own Moblin

As Moblin is targeted to distribution builders, there's a toolkit to build your own Moblin-based distribution: Moblin Image Creator 2 (MIC2), which is based primarily on Fedora live CD tools. MIC2 automates the creation of installation media, such as an ISO image or an image for a USB pen drive. You can create a project and a target, customize your target with specific packages, then create an image. You can specify different repositories, such as Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Fedora. MIC2 is a generic tool that can be used to create images from any yum or apt package repository, so applications can be packaged as rpm or deb files. Thus, MIC2 makes it possible to build a full-fledged distribution which goes much further than the standard Moblin application set.

Conclusion

The Moblin 2 alpha release is a good showcase of what we can expect from netbook-targeted Linux distributions in 2009. Intel's fastboot technology, the Linux Connection Manager and the Moblin Image Creator are a good base platform. It will make distributors and netbook makers lives a lot easier. If these parties pick it up, the lives of netbook users will also be much easier by the end of this year.