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.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/ and data/ directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)