Moblin on the EeePC 901

After reading about the development of Moblin and owning an Intel Atom device myself I decided to give it a test run to see what it was all about. I downloaded both the 2.0 and 2.1 versions from here Moblin Releases. I also heard about the Ubuntu Moblin Remix being developed and downloaded a copy of that from here Dell Community. I tried all three of these with varying degrees of success.

All three (Moblin 2.0/2.1 and Ubuntu Moblin Remix) come as an img which can be used on a USB stick or SD card (instructions on this found at Moblin.org). Once booted from the storage media Moblin can be tried through the live img or installed, I decided to install to get the full experience. In all versions the install took roughly 3 minutes.

First off I tried Moblin 2.0 and the boot up and over all speed of the Distro was lightning quick. It took about five seconds for it to boot and there was no delay in navigating the system. The interface takes a little getting use to but once you learn where everything is and how it works it all becomes very easy and intuitive. Once you get to the UI you are greeted with "My Zone". Here you have three columns, one column with calendar and to do list, one with recently/most used apps and visited web pages and one column with twitter/last fm feeds and instant messaging.


The navigation bar hides at the top and has icons for different tasks, this bar can be accessed by either putting the curser at the top of the screen or by pressing the super key. (The super key on most PCs would be the one with a Windows icon on it, in the case of the EeePC it's the one with the image of a house). This Navigation bar when triggered by either method drops down to give you access to the icons.


The icons in the Navigation bar From left to right My zone, Status, People, Internet, Media, Clip Board, Applications and Zones. There are also icons for Bluetooth (version 2.1 only) Battery state, Volume and network.

Here's a breakdown of what they are:
My Zone : As described above
Status : Allows you to post twitter feeds and change your status on instant messaging accounts


People : Allows you to search for people and details within your IM accounts
Internet : opens Moblin's integrated Web Browser which fills the whole screen. This opens up showing the most/recently viewed web pages and an address bar.



Media : allows you to view pictures, play video and music
Clip Board : holds anything you've copied via Ctrl+C etc.
Applications : here you have different categories such as Accessories, Games, Office, Internet and Settings. Under each category as you would expect you'll find icons that link to different apps and there are a good range installed by default.



Zones : This is an interesting take on window management. Each window you open takes up most if not all of the screen and even though you can move and resize the windows you can't minimise them. With zones you can keep track of open windows and each window is held in a dfferent work space (simular to the virtual desktop idea). You can access these windows by clicking this icon and selecting the window/work space you want or by Alt+TAB or Ctrl+Alt+Arrow keys (this last keyboard short cut doesn't work in version 2.1 which is a shame as it gives a nice graphical switching effect when used).


There are very little differences between 2.0 and 2.1. The boot up time is the same, 2.1 brings with it Bluetooth and 3G support. On the EeePC 901 in version 2.0 the wireless works fine but could not connect to a network where the SSID was hidden, only when the Network name was being broadcast would it connect despite the fact that it lets you type in Network details manually. Strangely the Wi-Fi wouldn't connect at all in version 2.1 even though it could detect the presence of the network.


Even though the 2.1 version boasts 3G support I was unable to get connected through a mobile phone. The battery indicator is different between the two versions as in 2.0 you have the battery status and brightness control together but in 2.1 the brightness control has been removed.


When booting from the Ubuntu Moblin Remix img you don't have the option of running a live session only to install. When you select to install the whole process is automated and you have no option to edit partitions etc like you do with the Moblin images. UMR is pretty much the same as Moblin 2.0 but with more applications installed and includes what looks like Open Office. Although Moblin doesn't have Open Office installed or available there was a comment on Moblin.org from a user claiming that using a Fedora RPM to install OOo worked very well and even made icons available in the correct place. The real down side that I found from UMR was the fact that it took longer to boot. When you boot into UMR you are greeted with the same progress bar found in Jaunty then taken to the same interface as above.


Moblin 2.1 unlike 2.0 has an app store where you can install extra applications. With Canonical developing their version this OS could shape up to be pretty good with an extensive list of available apps. Moblin is still a bit unstable, there were a few times when it froze on me or things didn't work as it should but then the default Xandros install that came with my netbook wasn't any better and sometimes suffered the same faults. I'm going to keep this as a dual boot with Ubuntu Karmic if just for the sheer speed to get on to the internet. I can't wait to see future releases of this and watch it mature. When it becomes more stable and is used more on netbooks this Distro is not only good for Linux fans and hobbyist but also a great netbook UI for end users with little computer experience.

Chocolate Tux

Was in Marks and Spencer's today and browsing their Christmas stock and discovered this chocolate penguin in amongst a range of Penguin confectionery. Does anyone else see an uncanny resemblance to anyone.............?

Education short response test Answers

New Convert

I was down in Dundee at the weekend visiting a friend and knowing my interest in Linux she asked me about it, her first question being "How much does it cost". When I told her it was free she was very impressed and asked if I could install it on her computer. She had a very dated looking Windows XP set-up (I'm not sure it even had SP2 installed) and her major gripe was the fact that she couldn't install the new live messenger and being stuck with an old MSN Messenger app.

Ever keen to get new people to try Linux I asked her if she was ok with me installing an OS and completely getting rid of windows. She never really plays games with it other than solitaire and mainly just uses it for the Internet "The perfect candidate for Linux" I thought to myself. With complete trust in me she agreed and when I asked if she was sure at getting rid of windows before I hit the return key she said "yep Kill it!" and with that the hard drive was formatted to ext4 and XP annihilated.

I had a bit of trouble at first as I didn't have an Ubuntu install disk on me (I chose Ubuntu over any other distro as I figured it'd be best for a new convert). So I used her Windows to download the ISO only to find out that I couldn't get any app in the OS to burn the image to disk. I managed to overcome this, luckily I had a copy of pupy 4.0 live cd. There was only one optical drive so I had to run puppy from ram, once booted I mounted the windows Drive and was able to burn the Ubuntu image to CD.

Once it was all installed and I set it up for her (installed restricted extras, libdvdcss, aMSN, compiz, VLC etc.) I showed her a few things to get going and let her play about with it. The overall result was good, She was impressed with it saying "It's like I've got a new computer". The one thing she spent the most time on was aMSN (I told her about empathy but didn't seem interested) I noticed in one of her IM's her saying "I've got the new MSN messenger now". I didn't bother trying to explain the difference but it goes to show that from an end user's point of view Windows / Apple / Linux / BSD it's all the same and the underlying technology doesn't matter as long as it does what they expect it to do.

Nothing Karmic about it.

I've had Ubuntu Karmic installed in both my Desktop and EEEPC since just after the release day, once installed I was quite impressed. Everything worked well, I was in awe over the X-splash effect and the cinematic shut down plus the improvement in boot up and shut down speed. I even like the extras such as Empathy, Evolution and the new Software Centre. A few weeks in though and some updates later every thing's going tits up. My FaceBook plugin for Empathy gave in the ghost, Gwibber has been very twitchy and Kaffeine pre 1.0 is pants.

I may look into trying to fix these annoyances or maybe stick it out in hope an update will fix them for me, I don't know if I want to spend my time tweeking till it works. A part of me wishes that I'd stayed with Jaunty but hope Karmic will improve seeing as we're heading into an LTS edition in April. Small annoyances they may-be but if they don't get fixed it'll just bug the hell out of me and I may make the switch to another Distro like Mint or something, Hell I might even give Slackware a go!

OS Success

Great news I finally got Linux to work on the PC. Ok it's not the Ubuntu distro that I tried in vein to install but it's a Linux OS none the less. PCLinuxOS or PCLOS for short is the distro I successfully installed. This distro seems very user friendly and was easy to install. When booting from the CD the software basically does a check on your system then gives you the best options to install (the whole process is done for you) no messing about. The OS looks very cool and comes in lightning blue rather than Ubuntu classic brown. I'm probably going to spend hours on the computer now playing about with it and getting used to the environment (I'm very excited!!!).

So FINALLY I can start to enjoy the world of Linux properly and get more involved.

Fun in Linux Land

After using PCLinuxOS for some time I grew a bit bored with it, I wanted to try something else. I pulled out my CD case full of various Linux Distros and started trying them to see if I could get something else installed. After much disc swapping and Internet searching I finally managed to get Mandriva 2008 one working (with Compiz effects in all). They way I managed to get it going after my first failed attempts was by typing the command "acpi=off" in the boot option. As far as I'm aware the acpi has something to do with power management but by turning it off the installation went flawlessly on my system. I've been playing around with it now for awhile and haven't gotten bored with it yet, I love the 3D desktop, wobbly windows and all the little animations that go with it.







Despite being chuffed with myself that I got a new OS running and having fun with all the bells and whistles I still wanted to get Ubuntu installed as it was my first choice and seems to be a very popular Distro within the Linux community. Aaron ordered some free discs from the Ubuntu website for the latest release 8.04 Hardy Heron. So I decided to try agian to get it installed and again the live CD wouldn't work and nothing was happening till I changed the boot option again this time adding the commands "acpi=off", "noapic" and "nolapic". After typing in these commands I finnaly managed to get it installed but it wasn't flawless. I had problems with the screen resolution I couldn't read anything being displayed. I managed to find some help online with the Ubuntu forums and typed a bit of extra code into the "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" file and this solved the problem.

When I say it solved the problem it did to an extent as I could now read what was on screen and the display was much better but now I'm stuck with a 800x600 resolution on a 1028x1024 monitor. I don't mind the low res though it means everything is allot bigger and easier to see (and it's not like I'm playing World of Warcraft or Medal of Honor on it or anything). Also I still can't get the Compiz to work through Ubuntu like on Mandriva but I'm still happy with it.

So now I have a system that dual boots Mandriva and Ubuntu (I'm WELL impressed). Now I'm going to reattach the hard drive containing Windows XP (not that I've used it since last year) and I'll have a Triple booting PC! ACE!!!