Intel takes on Windows with netbook OS

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 30 Jan 2009 at 17:22

Intel has released the alpha of its Linux-based operating system, dubbed Moblin 2.

Based on the Fedora distro, Intel has developed Moblin to take advantage of Atom-based netbooks and Core 2 processors, with the chip maker hoping to spur third-party app development around the platform.

Ultimately, Intel is hoping to eke further battery and performance gains from these systems, but for the moment Moblin's greatest selling point is its speedy boot time.

Intel has built some impressive read-ahead boot technology into Moblin and Atom users should see boot times falling well within a minute, according to the company. Core 2 systems could be closer to five seconds, which would throw the cat among the pigeons concerning instant-on platforms such as Splashtop.

The new internet connection manager, ConnMan, also promises to streamline the networking manager found in rival distros.

While the release looks promising, evidence of its alpha status can be found throughout. The user interface is still in development, and for the moment Moblin is running the fairly simplistic XFCE desktop environment.

This will eventually be dropped for an icon-based GUI more suited to the mobile environment, though the company has given no clue when we're likely to see this.

The release notes also confess that "3D performance is known to be slow" and while the Asus Eee PC 901 is supported, its Wi-Fi isn't.

More details on how to get the alpha can be found in the documentation.