OSCON notes and sneak peek at Moblin 2.0

By Jeff Moriarty (Intel) (33 posts) on July 23, 2008 at 5:31 pm

OSCON has been an interesting run for me today, and I think my brain is full.  My focus has been following Moblin and mobile device development, and it has been a mixed bag.  The Moblin Camp yesterday was sadly canceled, but there was lots of interesting things to be found in the sessions and on the exhibition floor.  At right Prajwal Karur Mohan shows off a Compal MID in the Intel booth.

In this morning's keynote, Tim O'Reilly said that the next big browser wars were going to be on the mobile front, and that mobile open source was a critical place for developer to engage.  Great to hear!  Sadly, then Tim mentioned openmoko and Android as two examples, he did not mention Moblin.

Fortunately Dirk Hohndel shared quite a bit more information in his follow-up remarks and a session later in the day.   While Moblin has a lot of support from Intel, it is really a community effort.  It is not just for Atom devices, but currently runs on other devices and architecture, with more on the way.  Dirk even mentioned that he aware of at least one person working on a port to ARM.

The objective of the Moblin project is to:

Dirk also announced that the version of Moblin currently out, Moblin 1.0, will be replaced shortly with Moblin 2.0.  Dirk said contrary to what people may have perceived from an article in The Register, the Moblin 2.0 changes are entirely technically driven decisions, and should spawn even greater community engagement.

An Alpha of Moblin 2.0 should be ready in 3 to 4 weeks, but developers can give it a peek now by going to http://www.moblin.org/playground If you're an open source developer, I'd love to hear what you think.

Categories: Mobility, Open Source

Comments (1)

July 24, 2008 8:57 AM PDT

Du Wei 杜伟 (Intel)
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 Jeff, glad to read about what's happening at OSCON and Moblin. In Asia, we see a few of the Moblin 1.0 powered device start to ship , including the Lenovo U8 Olympics Edition, Aigo MID among others. Moblin would need more community support to be able to evolve into a mature OS option and cross multiple platform or even architecure. Let us wait for the 2.0.

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