Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Intel will also have a mobile phone platform in the near future.
It runs on an atom chip with Moblin as Operating System.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/22/i...-1-for-phones/

If you look at the pictures of Moblin you will notice that they seem a bit similar to Maemo 5.
Therefore I post it, Maemo 5 and Moblin 2 have many similarities. It is important to know that both the user interfaces are based on Mobile GNOME (Hildon).
Maemo 5 is heavily based on Debian, while Moblin many parts of other distributions has ( Red Hat Linux).
I wonder how it will go in the future , Nokia will go to Maemo 6 (to Qt) , and Moblin will keep using GTK ?

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

intel was also showing of a iphone like mockup, only that it had hdmi out and some degree f usb under a cover on the side...

seems we are heading for interesting times, yet again...

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

So much for the "moblin targets netbooks, not handhelds" mantra. Good to see some competition though :-)

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Saw this on my way out the door this morning... I'm actually somewhat excited about this.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

I think Intel will be dangerous, because it will probably license to the pc makers. They may wind up joining Nokia's Maemo. I hope the two merge. I don't like all of the Linux distros for desktop. too confusing. I want a super linux for mobiles, not two of them.

I bet they want Qt ported, but they really already have access, don't they? I wonder if the mafw is enough to differentiate the two?

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Well, I thought that it would be a little late to be surprised of the combination of Intel and mobile devices in light of what has allready happened in this field.

What confuses me a little is where Nokia comes into the picture? Nokia and Intel announced this summer that they were entering into a strategic alliance in this respect with references to Moblin:
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archi...0623corp_b.htm
http://www.nokia.com/press/press-rel...newsid=1324456

I would imagine that both Nokia and Intel see that the market of consumer computing is rapidly moving towards the mobile segment - i.e. phones and netbooks.

For Intel this should be interesting in that there is a HW market here, and they want to go down-stream towards end-user market. Being then also able to skip Windows/Microsoft out of the wagon, should be no disadvantage.

For Nokia this means that they are fairly well positioned to take over a large chunk of the "PC market" (both with phones/maemo and also their new netbooks - if they can get the netbook price down, that is).

Nokia (regrettably) has announced that they at the same time are now planning to transform into a media company - where one can fear they are planning to lock in their large consumer computer customer base (to be) in the worst of Apple-manner.

So where are we and Nokia heading in the mobile (linux) area? I'm a little confused of what Nokia's involvement with Intel/Moblin may mean.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Fedora Linux.

They already collaborate. Such as with oFono, GNOME Mobile

Intel has different interests than Nokia. Such as Linux boot time in which Intel has put substantial effort.

You could see it as various Android or Symbian flavors. A lot is the same under the hood.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Intel and Microsoft are porting a browser plugin (not 'full Silverlight') of Silverlight to Linux/LPIA (Atom) specifically for Moblin. It should be available summer 2010, MS will provide more details in march. It'll be used in Intel's 'Atom App Store'.

Note the port is totally unrelated to Moonlight. So for Maemo, Nokia or ARM this is of no value.

My source is Webwereld (Dutch) (Google Translate)

According to this post on Moonlight mailing list Moonlight 1.0 and Mono 2.2.1 run on Ubuntu 9.04/ARM (well, in QEMU).

I have to say only Silverlight 2.0 and later is interesting for me because that is what the few sites which use Silverlight are using. You'd also still need a license from Microsoft to play the audio and video codecs!

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Not really (although I don't see why that would be "dangerous" in any case). Moblin is free-speech and free-beer (and now belongs to the Linux Foundation).

With Maemo, Android, WebOS, LiMo, ALP, Motomagx, and a dozen flavours of Openmoko it's already way too late for that.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Much the same can be said for Silverlight - I've never accessed a site that requires it, and if I did find a site that needed it I wouldn't be visiting the site a second time.

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).

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

indeed, ARM != powervr, as thats something that TI adds to their SOC alongside the ARM core.

hell, powervr ones supplied graphics chips for desktop pc's, back when 3dfx (remember those?) where king...

thats the thing here, ARM do not make hardware, they only makes designs and specs. Iirc, the qualcomm snapdragon is cortex compatible on the binary level, but uses a qualcomm designed core, while samsung and TI, for example, uses ARM designed cores in their products.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Hopefully now that they've taken the plunge and joined the Linux Foundation we'll see some improvements.

I did say ecosystem (not singling out ARM Ltd exclusively). While I'm no big fan of Intel's they do have a much more open approach on their CPUs, GPUs, WLAN chips etc than what you typically find on an ARM-based system.

Heh, I was playing NWN on a powervr "kyro" card back in the day (ok, for small values of "playing", since the proprietary driver kept crashing at random points)

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

For those interested in the story...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10123149-64.html

Qualcomm is able to achieve this relatively high speed (1.5GHz) for a low-power processor because it did more than simply get a license from ARM. "We went and got an architecture license from ARM. The architecture license was for their new instruction set, the V7 instruction set. There's a difference between getting an architecture license and just getting a core license. A core license means ARM does the (chip) core and they give it to you. The architecture license is different: the actual implementation is your own.

"About four years ago we had a bunch of guys join (who) used to work for IBM in the PowerPC group," Gill said. He said the engineers came from IBM's chip group that designs chips for low-power "embedded" devices.

"There was a need to go do something beyond this. So, we went and got the architecture license (from ARM) and we have this team of about 50 CPU designers and we put them to task. So, four years and $350 (million) to $400 million later, we have a CPU that actually works better than the (typical) ARM CPU."

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

That's why I said it's a double edged sword. Intel is perhaps more open in some aspects, but can get complacent from time to time because of the lack of competition (except for the occasional AMD surge). On the other hand ARM can't sleep/stop innovating as then it's own children will try to eat it :)

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

also, when it comes to gpu's on X86, there is intel, amd/ati and nvidia, all of whom have had to deal with open source for much longer then arm/powervr (iirc), and nvidia still insisit on making closed source drivers rather then opening up info like amd and intel have done (or i think intel have done, as they seems to employ a fair bit of open source developers).

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Look, same here, but usually when a site requires Flash I don't want it. I like to be able to enable Flash only when I want to, Flashblock-style.

Now, I don't say Silverlight is widely used (nor do I say I love MS or want to see Silverlight replacing Flash), but the examples I gave are useful.

Back with EC2008 football the alternative was DVB-H, cable or DVB-T (not portable), Windows (e.g. laptop), or simply not watching it. For a mobile device only DVB-H is a reasonable option. These devices were sold during EC2008, but DVB-H has not a commodity. It is much more rare than say a camera on a phone.

If Microsoft wants Silverlight to replace Flash they will do their best to port Silverlight to ARM, including Android and Linux, simply because these devices have marketshare. They also care to optimize the performance on par with competing technologies.

Hopefully, if it catches up with Silverlight 2, is cross platform (x86-64, non-SUSE, ARM), and the license fees for the codecs are reasonable. Still, it is strange Microsoft does not collaborate better with Novell on this one.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

in response to me saying I don't like all of the Linux distros, only want a super distro
I totally see your point now. I'm new to Linux, but I now see that the different distros are just separate modular builds of Linux having the things they may need and ignoring those you don't. From what I understand, you can add what you need if its missing anyway. Great point. I learned something from that. I love being schooled...:D

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

and i love your new avatar. ;)

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

I had to pull out my professional hat and attitude to try to quell some of the discord around here. It worked on our Symbian forums... Glad you like it. I have dredlocks now, so some might not recognize that 2008 photo.

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

LG Gw990 Intel Moorestown smartphone , watch the video just great at 5.00 minutes and the os is Moblin 2.1 Linux based and a screen resolution 1024X480 ;).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPKTf...ayer_embedded#

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

Thanks For Sharing

http://tinytwitt.com/content/23/smile.gif

Re: Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
 

I didn't want to copy-paste my post, but I would like to point to it:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...337#post461337
Are there any more negatives with intel x86 + moblin? Something I've misunderstood about this stuff? I'd like feedback please :)
Because right now I cannot wait for more moblin devices and I think moblin might become a lot more widespread compared to maemo.
The more open systems the better to beat the crap out of all the closed ones (which are too many to mention)