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Moblin is not the UIMoblin is not the UIPosted Nov 26, 2009 8:58 UTC (Thu) by jonas.bonn (subscriber, #47561)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Moblin review
I was at a Moblin seminar just yesterday and the Intel people were very keen to point out that Moblin is NOT the user interface, but rather the stack of components underneath it. "Moblin Compliance" was the key, meaning that any distribution that provides the components specified by the Moblin Core definition can be considered to be Moblin.
The user interface is just a toy, an "experiment" in their words. Given that it uses just the Moblin Core components, it will run on any Moblin compliant system and is, as such, an interesting demo application. That said, the UI should not be confused with Moblin as the system could still be Moblin even if it ran, say, Gnome.
That's what I took away from the seminar, in any case. If any Moblin folks see it differently, feel free to correct me... and your colleagues, too, in that case!
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Moblin is not the UI Posted Nov 26, 2009 10:40 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
I tested the initial Moblin releases, wich were based in XFCE, and was very pleased with it. Should I be able to replace the fancy Moblin UI with XFCE again, I would be happy as a child.
On a second thought, maybe my wife (the real main user of my netbook machine) would like the Moblin UI best, as it fits better what she does with the machine, so being able to chose UI would be best, IMNSHO.
Moblin is not the UI Posted Nov 26, 2009 17:20 UTC (Thu) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link]
As one of the designers behind the Moblin interface you can assume that I see it differently. I'd certainly be interested to know who told you that so we can have a full and frank discussion.
Moblin is many things, as you note, there is Moblin Core, this is the thing that you have to be 'compliant' with that's the thing that makes things fast and power friendly. This is a good base for anyone to build a product or distro on. Moblin compliance is sort of like LSB++.
There is also the Moblin interface, which doesn't actually have a name but which I usually refer to as the Netbook UX. People can take this set of code and run it on any distro they like (and they do). This is not a 'toy' or an 'experiment', it's an experience aimed at some very specific scenarios and people (as most comments seem to note, which is cool). If you like it, it makes me happy though.
"Moblin' is the distro that you get from moblin.org which uses the Moblin interface and is Moblin compliant.
The product the grumpy editor reviewed is Ubuntu with the Moblin interface on top (thus the boot time and the wakeups are Ubuntu's thing - the interface failings are ours), as other commenters have noted you can get the interface from lots of distros, my personal favourite of the other ones is opensuse's version but the more the merrier.
Moblin is not the UI Posted Nov 26, 2009 23:51 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I'm still confused as to what Moblin is.What you're calling the Moblin interface: is this a user interface? If so, I would certainly recommend putting the word "user" in there, because there are lots of other kinds of interfaces.
"Moblin' is the distro that you get from moblin.org Is this "distro" in the Linux sense, i.e. operating system? Is this thing I get from moblin.org something I can install on bare hardware? The product the grumpy editor reviewed is Ubuntu with the Moblin interface on top What about Moblin Core, or what the previous poster called the stack of components underneath the UI. Are those in there somewhere too? At one point, the grumpy editor replaces Moblin 2.0 with 2.1, all the while separately running Ubuntu. Did he misspeak? Because that seems inconsistent with your definition of Moblin.
Moblin is not the UI Posted Nov 27, 2009 19:11 UTC (Fri) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link]
Moblin is a vision.
A vision of how the user should experience a netbook.
The implementation for that vision contains many pieces; the most visible one is the desktop environment. But experience is a lot more than just the desktop environment; it includes network connectivity, power, performance, boot, etc.
The Moblin project publishes a Linux distribution that works towards this vision; other OS vendors work with the Moblin project towards a similar vision and sometimes have "Moblin" as part of their product name.
I realize that this is sometimes confusion, and our grumpy editor got confused a little bit as well; just adding more to the general confusion.
The only thing that tries to keep the Moblin ideas "whole" is the trademark (including compliance); but that is a fine balance. One the one hand, there are requirements on when/how you can use the trademark (don't ask me, I'm not the guardian of that), on the other hand the open source community frowns on enforcing trademarks like this in general....
Moblin is not the UI Posted Dec 4, 2009 21:40 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"I'm still confused as to what Moblin is."
I was under the impression that it was Intel's attempt to try and tie as much of the mobile linux infrastructure to x86 as possible and distract people from ARM.
Am I wrong?
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