November 26, 2009, 12:22 pm
If you’re in the United States today (Thursday, Nov. 26), you’re home celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday. If you’re outside the U.S., you may have noticed a lot less email coming from America, where many people have the day off.
While you’re sitting around wondering what to do with your spare time (because you’re an American off work, or you’re a non-American with a lot less email to read), here are a couple of stories.
The first is the “Grumpy Editor’s Moblin Review,” published on LWN.net. Written by Jonathan Corbet, the story discusses a first impression of the Ubuntu Moblin Remix installed on a Dell Mini 10v netbook. The author was fairly negative, but probably because he’s not the right audience for a netbook. As a Linux power user, he’s frustrated by the limitations of the consumer-friendly Moblin graphical user experience, the small screen and the small keyboard. As he writes, “And, frankly, Moblin-like software just tends to get in the way of a user who is used to the full Linux desktop experience and who does not spend a lot of time on Twitter. “
Despite the generally downbeat review, the story is worth reading because it provides a genuine first look at the Moblin netbook experience. Those of us who have long been into this technology have lost that new-user perspective.
The second story is “Chromium OS, Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook Remix Benchmarks,” published on Phoronix by Michael Larabel. This technically beefy article provides thorough examination:
The operating systems we tested for this round of benchmarking included Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10, Moblin 2.1, Fedora 12, Chromium OS, and openSUSE 11.2. We built Chromium OS from source at build 999.999.32609.201950-a1 without any external patches or configurations. All tested distributions were left in their default configurations, packages, and settings.
The story is about more than speed: Michael also looked thermal performance, battery consumption, CPU usage and other statistics. Read it and enjoy the results!
