Moblin & Netbook

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Sprite

Beanbag Brain
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Horbury, West Yorkshire
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Welcome to my little project. Its been a while since I've been really active here, but I'm about to embark upon a journey of discovery and fun and I thought you guys may like to follow.

Im about to purchase a new netbook, namely the Samsung NC10/NC110 which I can get for around £304.99. This seems to be the best around according to the reviews (if you have one please share your experience). Im going to upgrade the RAM to 2GB for around £25.

Once I have the netbook it gets interesting because Im going to be wiping dirty XP from the HDD and installing an optimized version of Linux built specifically for netbook and mainly Intel Atom netbook called Moblin from the Video (shown below) this UI seems slick and very easy to use.

So please chirp up if you have either products or even both running like Im going to and I will post pics as soon as I have them.

 
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Good luck with the project. NC10 is definitely the king of netbooks. I nearly bought one. Seems netbooks are quite amenable to interesting builds - a friend at work has OS X on a Dell Mini 9.

Keep us up to speed. :)
 
Yes, do keep us updated. A Dell Mini 9 and Moblin 2.0 sounds very tempting. I love what they've done to the interface. The first iteration was too "Linux."
 
The OS is making me think about getting a netbook but I wonder about video and music codec support as I like a wide range of support when I play my media.
 
nick09
The OS is making me think about getting a netbook but I wonder about video and music codec support as I like a wide range of support when I play my media.
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I've read through the support pages and aparently the media player kills the memory and uses about 80% so making the netbook unable to perform while it's playing music or video. But I guess I will find out today. As soon as I get it I will give you some answers to codecs.

It's been seen to boot in five seconds and also the on/off is done by the button on the hardware instead of software shutdown. If the OS works as advatised on the video then I can't wait. There is also a video on YouTube that is a five minute walkthrough.
 
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I'm not sure what the NC10/110 has, but if it has a Broadcom Wifi Chipset then the Wireless won't work with this build.
 
Casio
I'm not sure what the NC10/110 has, but if it has a Broadcom Wifi Chipset then the Wireless won't work with this build.
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It uses Atheros chipset. At least the UK model does. Hopefully it should be fine. If it proves to be a pain there is always other Linux builds optamised for netbooks. Thaks for the heads up.
 
Just picked up the netbook. But I'm on a bus from Bradford to Wakefield and it's going over hill and dale to get there. This just isn't funny. I got a 2gb strip of Kingston RAM and a pink mouse for the missis.

**Edit @ 20:12pm**

Just installed the RAM and started the netbook, obviously its got XP on but not for long, if the Live version of Moblin works well then its going to be permanently installed. The fresh netbook is full of bloatware that is so unnecessary.

Some pics:

mg3579.jpg


&

mg3580.jpg
 
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Ok so I've got the Netbook up and running and got rid of 80% of the bloatware, to be honest Im not 100% sure what I can and cant get shut of from the netbook just in case I remove a vital system and set myself back another few hours finding out what I've done.

Last night I downloaded the image file and started to do the walkthrough for burning the image to the USB drive I was going to use. All well upto the burn part when for some unknown but more than likely my fault, the mac rejects my usb and basically renders it from a 3.8GB drive to a 606MB drive???!!!!???

Today straight from work I've purchased another Kingston Data Traveler USB drive and Im going to burn the USB through XP as it seems allot easier. In the mean time I've found out how to recover the partition from the USB drive I fried and thats where I am.

This is so much fun and so geeky at the same time, I feel so dirty.

EDIT: Moblin For The Win

Yes boys and girls im now rocking Moblin V2 Beta.

First impressions have me stunned from the off. Boot time for an interface with such a polish and pazaz it boots like a NASA rocket, about 20 seconds from a USB flash drive. The layout and look is swish and funky but not cluttered or counter productive in anyway.

I will give some more impressions soon.
 
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nick09
Sounds good so far. I can't wait to hear on the different media types it supports.
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Well im still running the distro from the pen drive st the moment. So far I've found that the distro works as advatised and expected. I cant believe this flavour of Linux isnt big. Once they have a final build it deserves to be an option on all majour Netbooks.

It isnt without problems tho, the text fields need to be clicked in twice before it will allow any typing. But on the other hand the wireless side of things worked flawlessly and picked up even more connections than my parents Macbook.

As far as file types go for media I havent had much time to check. I will try tommorow with various Image, Video and Audio formats.

I can say, if you have a netbook and a spare 2GB USB drive try it.
 
I've given it a quick go. Strangely enough I've found it kinda sluggish, but I'm only running the live CD. The interface is very clean with large icons, it's pretty easy to use. However, maybe I'm just used to Windows Icons, but some of these Moblin ones aren't as intuitive as they could be, and more than a couple of times I had mouse over to see what it actually did.

The browser is pretty basic, and you are unable at this stage to configure things like proxy server settings. Hopefully this comes at a later date.

All in all, it's the best Linux disto I've seen suited to a Netbook thus far, but I wouldn't be using it as a primary OS, it's just too basic and watered down. That said, I'm a geeky person who edits registry files and works in Tech Support, so I might not be the best Usecase for this, but given the unpopularity of Linux for people buying netbooks in the past, I still think people want a fully featured OS.
 

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