Hands-On with the Moblin 2.0 Beta for Atom-Based Netbooks

When Moblin 1.0 first hit the scene in 2007, claiming to be a malleable Linux distribution custom-tailored to netbooks, it was greeted largely with yawns.  Sporting a quotidian XFCE desktop, there was zero eye candy, and based on Ubuntu, it seemed redundant in light of the existing work on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.  Last year the Moblin project switched from Ubuntu to a kernel based on Fedora, and totally rethought the visual design.  The Moblin 2.0 beta just dropped, and it looks like the dev team were definitely awake at the wheel this time around.

For my testing I installed Moblin 2.0 on an Atom-based Archos 10 netbook using a bootable USB thumb drive.  Installation was simple, taking about twelve-ish minutes, and all of my hardware was detected and usable on first boot except for the onboard webcam.

The Desktop and Animations

Sporting a completely refreshed desktop design, Moblin 2.0 is based around virtual desktops, called “zones”, that are navigated using a transparent toolbar that’s called using the Win key or simply by touching the top of the screen with your mouse.  Once the toolbar scrolls into view, you can select between menu items centered around basic tasks like “Internet” and “Media”, or navigate between zones.

Animations abound, and they’re frankly beautiful.  Task transitions are elegant, and moving between applications feels smooth and intuitive.  Most of the desktop is animated in a completely integrated way, including icons for media.  It’s something about Moblin that screenshots don’t do justice.

The key jumping-off point is the “m_zone” (pictured right), which is a portal page that collects your calendar, to-do lists, recently used files, favorite applications, and RSS feeds all in one spot.  It looks great and organizes the netbook’s limited desktop space well.

When you have multiple applications open, you may want to assign them to different zones, which are dynamically-generated virtual desktops–that is, unlike conventional operating systems with virtual desktops, zones don’t exist until you assign applications to them.  Close all applications in a zone, and the zone goes away, saving precious computing overhead.  Switching between zones can be done using the “Zones” menu item in the toolbar, or you can use a keyboard shortcut (SHFT+CTRL+left or right).

Applications and Media

Basic applications have their own skins in Moblin but are familiar to Linux users: Firefox browser, Nautilus file manager, Empathy IM client, etc.  In many cases the Moblin versions strip out some features in the name of staying lean, which is not too surprising in a netbook distribution but may frustrate some power users.

The most frequently-used applications have menu items in the toolbar, but there’s also an “Applications” menu item that will list all software installed on the computer (pictured left).  The default Moblin install comes with about 15 core programs, including file browser, terminal, calculator, screenshot grabber, Dates calendar application, and more.  Note that a proper office suite is decidedly absent.  I attempted to install AbiWord, generally considered to be the leanest of the Word-compatible word processors, and it brought my netbook to its knees almost immediately.  So while Moblin is designed to stretch your Atom processor, it clearly can’t work miracles.

New software programs as in most Linux distributions are installed using a “Software Catalog”, which is a package-manager based on Fedora’s YUM.  At the time of this writing there’s not much software in the repositories, and you should be aware that many regular .rpms don’t work, as I learned when I tried to install Adobe Flash.  This is where the beta shows its seams the most.  Right now software is limited in Moblin and difficult to install, frequently erroring out or in some cases, installing and simply not working.

But the basics work sufficiently well, including the web browser and media player.  The web browser is a bit touch and go, however, since installing Flash was a gigantic hassle that I never did get working right, and several sites such as YouTube and CNN.com didn’t render properly.  But its clean styling and easy tab management are encouraging, and the browser also incorporates the “speed dial” concept that opens blank pages with thumbnails of favorite sites.

The media player is deceptively simple in design, but organizes all the media on your hard drive into libraries automatically.  It handles audio, video, and photos all by its lonesome.  And instead of flashy play/pause buttons, the media player instead puts all the flash into your media: icons shift and scroll and organize themselves into stacks based on the zoom level.  So at a high zoom level, say, you can see individual tracks with album art–but zoom out more and the track icons will stack themselves into an album view.  It’s a very cool visual concept about handling data that works surprisingly well.  Want to play the whole album?  Zoom out to the album stack view and simply drag the whole stack into the playlist.  No menu items involved.

More Eye-Candy, Please

Overall Moblin 2.0 is turning out to be more exciting than anyone thought it had a right to be, and despite some definite rough edges it’s worth watching where this little OS will end up.  It’s nowhere near ready for daily use–I had a couple of hard crashes requiring reboots and installing software still has a lot to be desired–but you can definitely get a feel for what the finished product will be like.  It’s not hard to imagine seeing Moblin variations on not just netbooks, but lean-client desktops (”Net-tops”) and even embedded devices.

Check out more screenshots after the cut.

–Aric A.



The initial desktop is clean–almost confusingly so.  You might think you’re waiting for the system to still load, but it’s ready to go:

The browser has a simple, visually appealing skin, and most sites render fine on it…:

…however, Flash-heavy sites not so much:

Don’t let the simple look of the media player fool you–the visual transitions and zooming metaphor for navigating libraries is pretty sweet in practice: