14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like Intel hasn't spent too much time contemplating the release of Ubuntu Moblin Remix Developer Edition. The chip maker and the rest of the developers working on the project scrambled back to work and stirred the netbook market a little more. Yesterday they announced that Moblin v2.0 was finally stable and was available for download, that the community preview of the next version, Moblin v2.1, was already available, and on top of that there are now two new software projects for users to test: Moblin Garage and Moblin Application Installer.
Since netbooks are the rising stars of portable computing, the Moblin developers have high hopes for this 2.0 release, as Imad Sousou points out in the release announcement: "The project release of Moblin v2.0 is now available. With this community release you can expect to see OSVs and OEMs shipping products based on Moblin v2.0 for netbooks. Moblin v2.0 features a rich user interface that was developed from the ground up, for netbook form factors and usage models, to provide an outstanding visual user experience that integrates internet browsing, media consumption, and social networking."
The upcoming Moblin v2.1 is envisioned as an incremental update of Moblin 2.0, containing new features and developments. The target market will expand, encompassing Mobile Internet Devices, car entertainment and embedded devices like mobile phones and PDAs. The final release, which is expected to happen by the end of the year, will contain Moblin Garage and Moblin Application Installer, along with many community-requested features like a wider range of display resolution support, myzone and instant messaging improvements, an up-to-date kernel, better localization and mobile connectivity support.
It looks like the developers are targeting a common goal of most Linux distributions lately, easy application installation, and Moblin Garage together with Moblin Application Installer were envisioned to serve this purpose. However, they did it a little bit differently than, say, Ubuntu. They don't just rely on the existing application repository to provide the user with a list of software, the developers of open-source applications just add their stuff to the Moblin Garage, a web-based software catalog. When the user wants to see the available alternatives to a certain application, they start up Moblin Application Installer, which fetches data from the Moblin Garage and presents it to the user locally.
Although v2.0 is out for only a day now, there are many comments about its lack of support for the Intel GMA500 video chipset, a graphics solution used in many netbooks like the Dell Mini series, the Acer Aspire One 751 or the Asus EEE 1101HA.
If you have an Intel Atom-powered netbook you too can have a go at running Moblin v2.0 or even the 2.1 preview version; just download them from Softpedia.