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.
“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……
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.