Stuff Michael Meeks is doing |
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The official announcement of Moblin 2.0 happened - with all the code for the first time. I'm dead pleased, in particular because it sucks to fill a blog full of minutia about ones personal dental care - instead of tech content - becuase Moblin has been substantially secret until now.
So is that what you've been working on - I hear you ask ? well, sort of - only - most of the hard work was done by the great bunch at Intel, many from the OpenedHand, famous of yore, and fun to hang out with. Of course we've spent a lot of time putting some great pieces into the pie too - but my role (frustratingly) has mostly been around wringing ever more performance out of the OpenSUSE / SLE boot process - so we can deliver those sexy pixels faster to your popping eyes.
Having said all that, and there'll be a lot more to be blogged about over time - at Novell we've been working on some fun bits. Anjal of course, but also Aaron has been working away at 'cubano' - a new banshee front-end using clutter, and Tambet has been creating a simple, easy-to-use new UI for NetworkManager called carrick - along with some great 3G information parsing stuff. Hopefully these guys'll blog about this shortly too. Of course - a lot of the design and flair in the UIs has come from Intel's excellent UI team - thanks guys: and late at night sadly I can only remember Nick's name.
Well - it's cool and sexy - if you don't believe me, watch the pretty Intel Video. Of course - it works wonderfully on all those sexy, slim netbooks out there with fairly low res screens, poor touch-pads and so on. I for one like the netbook form factor, and more so with Moblin on it.
Of course, for bigger desktop or laptop machines - with more power, more pixels, you might be able to host a more business'y desktop - with the complex UIs you expect there: your Evolution, Exchange meeting booking, and so on. ie. There is still a huge space in the market for GNOME, KDE etc. This new UI is clearly light, simple, consumer focused, and (increasingly) a pleasure to use. Conversely - if you don't have fairly good 3D support - the new UI is not for you: go buy a new Atom netbook instead.
Of course, Moblin is many things - well worth checking out their pretty web-site, but the UI components (and they collectively need a good name - at least one better than say bognor-regis - thanks Iain for the reflected glory on that place: giving Bognor Regis a good name as it were) can sit on top of any distro - much like a 'normal' desktop eg. GNOME. As such - you can find them (and a mix of other bits) packaged for OpenSUSE 11.1 and Factory, as well as a warning - dangerous - immediate disk flashing bootable ISO in these places.
Exciting, pretty, slick, sexy, new, fast-booting, interesting thing: play with it, and get involved.