How was Moblin discussion at Seacoast LUG?

[Ben Scott]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 11:17 AM, Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:
> I had hoped to make it last night, but pesky paying work got in the way.
> Anyone attend? How was the presentation?

  I was there, along with 9 or so others.

  It was interesting.  It's kind of hard to describe the presentation
of a distro via email... let's see....

  Moblin <http://moblin.org/> is a project mainly targeting mobile
devices like in-car entertainment systems, media players, GPSes,
mobile phones, handheld organizers, etc.  It seemed to be several
things.  It's an independent distribution you can install stand-alone.
 But it also appears to be a user environment you can install on other
distros.  I'm not sure how it breaks down at the component level.

  One highlight of Moblin is the fast boot time.  It can be up and
ready for use within 5 seconds or so.  Obviously an important thing
for something like a boom-box that might have the power turned off at
any time.

  Rob described a tool called "unetbootin", not Moblin-specific, to
help create bootable distro media.  You basically feed it an ISO image
and a USB flash drive or memory card, and it makes the later bootable
with the former.  It also supports Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.  Rob said
something about it having multiple methods, and one being much slower
to boot than the other, but I didn't understand the details.

  Moblin is not bug free.  It only creates device nodes (/dev/sda,
/dev/sda1) for the first few drives and/or partitions, which can be a
problem if you have more than a few.  It also tries to boot so fast
that sometimes USB devices are not ready when it looks for them.  One
has to add an option in GRUB to make it pause and wait for USB to
settle on some computers.  That's made more difficult by the fact that
it hides the GRUB menu by default (fast boot, remember?).  Rob seemed
to have the answers to these, but I again didn't get the details.

  The UI is interesting and somewhat novel.  It logs right in to a
user environment.  The "home screen" is a combination
history/most-used display combining programs, web sites, documents,
etc.  There are tabs across the top for things like applications,
personal presence (IM/SMS), web browsing, settings.  There's something
called "zones" which is kind of like a virtual desktop pager.  The UI
widgets are friendly towards touch-screen finger use.  It tries to
preserve state, so that, e.g., rebooting and then going back to web
re-opens the previous web page(s).  The history views try to be
thumbnail images of the thing, rather than a text description.  The UI
features lots of animation for browsing things like music and photos.

  Unfortunately, there seemed to be some kind of problem with the
wireless feed in the area.  Originally, we thought it was just
imperfect support for the wireless chipset on Rob's demo laptop, but
then we had at least two other people with the same continuous
disconnect/reconnect cycle.  The lack of a net connection made demoing
many of the "connected world" features impossible, which was
disappointed.

  That's most of what I remember.

  Unrelated to Moblin: Someone had scattered a few fliers from the FSF
(Free Software Foundation, the GNU people).  One made the interesting
point that contributing to a Free/Open Source Software project can be
a great resume builder in these times of scarce job markets.  You can
get useful experience, and end up with work you've done being used by
hundreds, thousands, or even millions of others.  That stands out on a
resume.

  The next SLUG meeting is scheduled for Mon 9 Nov 2009.  Rob's hoping
to take a look at "GPicSync" -- "GPS Pictures Synchronization".  I
guess it takes GPS data, combined with/extracted from digital photos,
and does magic with them.  You can do things like generate a map with
photos on it, or generate route-path data for a variety of map
systems, or other stuff.   <http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/>

-- Ben