Moblin 2.0 Released
As has been mentioned in the comments to one of my earlier blog entries, the final release of Moblin 2.0 is now available. I have installed it on my ASUS N10J, and I am still surprised and baffled by it.
Still baffled because I just don't get the desktop / user interface. I'm ready to write this off as being just me, because "social networking" is not the focus of my internet experience (or any other part of my internet experience, for that matter). But still, I would love to hear one person, just one, stand up and say "I love the Moblin desktop, I use it every day and it is significantly better than other desktops" - and then explain what it is that makes it better for them. Until that happens, I am going to be stuck with this sneaking suspicion that Moblin is getting a lot of attention, and a fair amount of acceptance in such distributions as Fedora and Ubuntu, primarily because of the heavyweights behind it (Intel et. al.).
Still surprised because of the number and magnitude of problems it seems to have on my computers. As I said, I have installed it on my ASUS N10J, and guess what? It still hangs on boot, just like almost every Moblin Beta release did. I had assumed that this would be taken care of by the time the final release came out, but obviously it hasn't, so I did a bit more digging this weekend to see what is really going on. It appears that the problem is my multi-boot setup - it chokes on the root file system check (fsck). I suspected that it doesn't like being installed in /dev/sda13, so I installed again, this time into /dev/sda6, and it boots just fine from there. I agree that the overwhelming majority of Moblin users will not have so many disk paritions, or be installing into a two-digit partition, but still...
The other problem is in the "relatively minor but extremely irritating" category, there doesn't seem to be a keymap for Switzerland in the installation selection, and after installation when I try to change the keymap, the Gnome keyboard applet crashes.
I hope that others are having better experiences with Moblin than I am.
jw 27/9/2009