Moblin – The Social Distro

As Linux junkie and a Netbook fan I’m always looking for ways to make the best of  the combo. I’ve gone through a lot distributions of Linux that have been optimized for the Intel Atom processor and motherboard. A few actually have been pretty good, but nothing fantastic.

I finally got around to trying Moblin Linux again to see how much it has improved. The distro is all grown-up and is pretty social connected from the moment you boot up.

I tested the OS first running off of a thumb drive of the ISO before installing it, just make sure I didn’t brick my test system. It can be done on 1 GB drive, but I used a 2 GB to allow some breathing room.

The install of Moblin is fast and simple – there were no questions to stump you during installation. If this was going to be your first Linux install, you might want to print out all of your system’s hardware specs for the sake of reference.

Once you have got the Moblin loaded onto your hard drive and boot-up you will be greeted by the MyZone screen which will have your memos and task for the day, snapshots of websites, MP3, videos and photographs you recently had open. Then to the right of the screen is a nice touch, your Twitter stream and Last.fm feed, this distribution was sculpted for use with the social Internet.   The desktop of Moblin reminds me of the HP Mini Mi interface.

The overall speed and navigation for Moblin is great. A Windows user may find themselves enjoying using the operating system better than Windows. There is very few things you will have to go digging around to find on Moblin. The only thing I could not locate was the Off on any menu. I save you the trouble of trying to find the answer, just hit the power button on your computer, the system will pop-up a dialog box to confirm you want turn off the computer.

Overall Moblin is a nice Linux distro for mobile computing. Hard core Linux users may take exception to it because is not as robust as Fedora or Ubuntu, but it was not designed for the task a power user would want. I would have liked to have seen a Facebook feed also in that area, but I’m thinking if I stay with this OS for a while I will write an app if no one else does. This will be the standard I will be judging all  Netbook operating systems by.