With Moblin2 Intel is taking another shot at developing a distro that runs on mobile Internet devices and netbooks. The first alpha of the small distro boots up fast.
Thanks to Bootchart and a modified version of Fedora's Readahead named sReadahead, Intel developers Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok could boot Fedora in five seconds at the Linux Plumbers Conference in September 2008. The technology they used is also part of Moblin2, which, according to DesktopLinux.com news, recently booted in just a few seconds off a USB stick.
Moblin2 has on board a brand new Kernel 2.6.29rc2 and X Server 1.6 with DRI2 support. A Connman tool should make wireless connections easier than the Network Manager that it replaces. An additional Moblin Image Creator (MIC2) lets you cobble together your own Linux variants.
Moblin2 currently uses the Xfce window manager, but that should soon change; the 3D performance is rather timid. The Moblin organization's alpha announcement provides on the supported hardware. To test Moblin2, download the live ISO and burn it to CD or USB stick. KVM and VMware images are also available to run the distro on a virtual machine.
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