Who’s next on the Moblin distribution list?

Posted on 28 July 2008, Last updated on 11 November 2019 by

Thoughtfix brings us the news (from The Register) that Moblin will be moving to a Fedora-based distribution. Thats quite a core change in architecture that is bound to upset Canonical and Xandros who have been working on Atom-optimised distributions and have also committed to make a Moblin-based version for netbooks. I suspect that Moblin will run the two builds side-by-side for a while. Dirk Hondel told The Register that "there was no falling out with Ubuntu, but the move to Fedora was a technical decision based on the desire to adopt RPM for package management."

Here’s a list of some of the current distributions running on Atom netbooks.

  • Suse on MSI Wind and HP Mininote – RPM based
  • Xandros on Eee PC – DEB based.
  • Canonical base system (Ubuntu Mobile) for MID development – DEB based
  • Linpus Lite on the Acer Aspire – RPM Fedora Based (Acer)
  • Asianux / MIDinux base system for MID development – RPM based

Only Ubuntu Mobile and Asianux are running the Moblin core so far but I’m sure we’ll hear news at IDF next month. I wonder if SuSE will make an announcement.

If support moves towards Moblin, what happens to the VIA and AMD-based devices? Can VIA and AMD contribute drivers for inclusion? Apparently Moblin supports non-Intel platforms so I guess that’s a possibility and seeing as some of VIA’s linux drivers are already open, there’s nothing stopping a Moblin distributor from dropping them in.

2 Comments For This Post

  1. REMF says:

    “I wonder if SuSE will make an announcement?”

    What announcement to you expect Suse might make?

    That they too will announce a moblin variant of their opensuse distro?

    I rather think not given that they have thus far gained a presence only on the larger netbook types offering a full desktop replacement package, rather than the mini flash-based netbooks.

    I am a big suse fan, and applaud MSI and HP for an excellent choice in distro’s, but i’m not sure any such announcement is going to happen……

  2. chippy says:

    It depends on sales I guess. If OpenSuse want to give millions of SUSE users the best battery life and core speed, it might make sense for them to branch a build made on Moblin. Like you, i’m a big SUSE fan (since V6) and I hope that others netbook OEMs pick it up.

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