Moblin scrubs up for beta

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 20 May 2009 at 11:27

Intel has released the first beta of the Moblin 2 operating system, complete with a shiny new User Interface.

Moblin 2 is based on the Fedora distro, and was developed by Intel to take advantage of Atom-based netbooks and Core 2 processors.

The biggest change from the alpha release is the replacement of the simplistic XFCE placeholder desktop with Intel's own unique user interface based on the Clutter framework.

Intel's effort eschews the standard Linux desktop look for a tabs bar that drops down from the top of the screen. The tabs each contain a bundle of applications in categories such as multimedia, office, social networking and web.

Whenever an application is opened a new "zone" is automatically created to house it. So, when you open a document, for example, a new zone is created housing all your open documents. When you hover over the zone it will display thumbnails of everything housed within.

Intel claims this will allow users to easily keep track of all their applications, despite the limited screen estate. This is aided by a search bar that operates in much the same way as Vista's, allowing you to quickly search through applications and documents.

One really neat feature of the UI is the M_Zone screen, which is essentially a system homepage that shows recently accessed documents, upcoming calender appointments, browsing history, IM messages and emails, and Twitter feeds in a column interface.

Moblin 2 also bundles the Empathy IM client and a custom browser based on Mozilla's Gecko HTML rendering engine. Anybody looking to give it a whirl can download it from the Moblin homepage.