Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

EC 2008 soccer required it. Olympics required it. And, here PDTV over IP requires it too.

Still, with Moblin also having Fluendo codecs this gives Moblin an advantage over ARM-based Linux such as Maemo. Although it is perfectly possible to get these Fluendo codecs on Linux/ARM.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Look at Symbian's various flavors. They all merged, so Maemo and Moblin could easily do the same. And Moblin can be dangerous. It could take over america and become a standard, and leave Maemo as a niche market. Unless all of the apps work on each exactly the same, it will be a war between them, and possibly Samsung with its Linux OS coming later.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

What do you people mean when you say 'merge' ? They use different hardware, (soon) different toolkits, different APIs, different packaging formats... I see people here telling that they are similar under the hood... but how exactly apart from 'being linux' ?

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Most of them (S80, S90, UIQ) were killed off for one reason or another actually.

Ah, I see what you mean, dangerous to Maemo. I wouldn't worry too much :-)

First of all Free software is an entirely different game, where parties cooperate openly for common or completely unrelated goals (see for example who writes linux, as well as the more obvious oFono and ConnMan projects).

Then consider that in this particular case there's no direct competition. Intel develops Moblin in order to sell chips while Nokia develops Maemo in order to sell whole computers and services. In fact it's entirely possible that at some point Nokia may be using Intel's chips for that (hey, stranger things have happened and it looks like Nokia are getting just as frustrated as the rest of us by the closed nature of the ARM "ecosystem" hardware).

From a consumer point of view, I'd much rather see 2-3 really strong alternatives than a single-distro monoculture. Different people want different things and a single company can't cater to all of them at the same time. I'm looking forward to the day when I can choose an open pocketable device from a number of different manufacturers and install my preferred OS on it (like we have been doing on PC-class hardware for a long time).

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Actually, they were combined into what will be called Symbian^4, coming soon from the Symbian Foundation. Some had development discontinued, but besides that...

but you make a good point of the difference between FOSS and retail platforms. Competition is not the same since each comes with its own community. I just think bonding those communities and resources could only help mobile linux get more mainstream in a better more deskop compatible form.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

ARM closed? not any more then any other hardware out there...

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

I don't deny there are sites out there that use Silverlight but I've never visited any and even if I did I wouldn't then waste my time installing yet-another-plugin (particularly one from the security experts in Redmond) just for that site.

Silverlight has such limited visibility on the internet that not having support for it in Maemo is just not a big deal, whereas having better Flash (such as the OMAP optimised Flash 10 Player due in the next few months) is a much, much bigger deal - I know which I would rather have!

And should Silverlight ever gain any traction on the internet, there's always the open source Moonlight... :)

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

... in terms of what?
Intel/Moblin help developing the ecosystem that Maemo is built upon. They have many core technologies in common, so some of what Intel invests into upstream projects will find its way back to Maemo.

Bad, bad, bad.
As a consumer, you should be able to choose among several options to find what's best for you. If you prefer one super-Linux... why not go all the way and say kill each and every OS and keep only one? No matter which one?
We used to have this situation on the desktop for years (before GNU/Linux gained momentum and before Apple recovered) and while it was good for a few software developers, it wasn't nice at all for consumers.

The fact I love most about GNU/Linux is that I can choose. Not only between distributions, but also between, say, desktop environments within a distribution.

Now that Maemo seems to be moving away from what I'm looking for in a mobile device, isn't it great to have a second choice? I'm not saying Moblin is what I need, I haven't even tried it, but still... there's hope. I wouldn't want to depend on Nokia the way I used to depend on Microsoft years ago.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Try to get the Cortex architecture manuals sometime. Even the ARMv5 one comes with this nasty term:

(AIUI the Qemu project managed to negotiate a special exemption to this).

Then there's the "small" matter of GPUs and their drivers...

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

That's because ARM doesn't make processors, it licenses them. That's a two-bladed sword, but hey, you will see plenty of those clauses in any low-level chipmaker manual, Intel and others are no better in that regard.

As for GPU, that's PowerVR, not strictly related to ARMs (after all, you even have Atoms touting SGX graphics).