First impressions

After seeing a few videos on Moblin.org and Youtube, I decided that the interface in Moblin was unique in more ways than one. First of all this was something that gathered your social information in one place whilst being extremely task oriented. Very apropriate for a netbook such as mine. I'd been running Windows XP Home on it, and while it ran OK considering the platform, it's just not my thing. I'm basically a very impatient person and endless swapping and slow response times do not sit well with me. Secondly this was a very strong and consistent look and behaviour for an F/OSS system - which has been one of my main issues with other offerings.

It didn't take me long to grab an image of the Moblin 2.0 beta/preview. I grabbed my trusty Xbox 360 HD DVD-player and hooked it up to the USB port of my Aspire One. Moblin has a nice liveboot feature, where you can actually see if you hardware works as expected. I found that I could log onto my wireless network and things seemed to work generally, so that was the end of Windows on this machine.

The installation is very, very simple, although I believe the formatting choices could be made even friendlier for newcomers. It's very easy to do a complete format and install, though. I'm glad I didn't try mixing it up with several operating systems at a time, even though it is entirely possible.

The system generally works fine, although it has issues waking up from standby. This doesn't matter much, however, as the system shuts down and boots in a matter of seconds, so I've simply started using that instead. Pretty much everything I do is stored in the cloud anyway, so it's not as if I'm dependent on saving states and data locally.

Other minor niggles include the wireless network manager not automatically reconnecting to known good networks, but I'm being told that this is as good as fixed and should be out soon. I'm looking forward to this, even though it's certainly easy and fast to log on as it does save WEP/WPA passwords just fine.