Moblin on the Nettop - First Steps

It was recently suggested in a comment to my blog that I try moblin on my Dual Atom Nettop system. I've wanted to look at moblin for quite some time, but had held back because my HP Mini-Note netbooks have VIA cpu and graphic chips, and I've heard that they can be difficult with moblin (and I saw for myself that they are difficult with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix). The new nettop uses very standard Intel chips, so this seemed like a good time to give it a try, and the suggestion was just enough to get me moving.

I have now finished the first few steps in trying it out:

- Download the latest test version. It is less than 700 MB, so it takes 15 minutes or less at typical broadband speeds.

- Copy the image to a CD or USB drive. I just used dd to squirt it onto an unused USB thumb drive. Be careful when you do this, because the image has to be copied to the raw device, so it will overwrite anything that is currently on the device.

- Boot it! At least in my case, that is all there is to do - and I am now writing this on moblin.

The desktop and menus are significantly different than any of the "typical" Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora or openSuSE. I don't even find them to be much like the Ubuntu Netbook Remix - if anything, my first impression of the desktop is better than it was with UNR, I find it to be less cluttered and more intuitive.

As I have literally had it running for only about 10 minutes, I haven't had a chance to look at anything in depth yet. The next step will be to install it on the disk, and then try configuring and using it for a while. I will write more on that as I go along.

jw 9/6/2009