MOBLIN ZONE

The new Moblin 2.1 release gives a lot of attention to improving the user experience based on feedback from the user, open source and developer community. In fact the changes that users are most likely to notice are minor but welcome differences in things like the ability to delete items from the recently viewed pane for privacy and better language support in the Myzone desktop.

“We consider this release as adding a lot more polish,” says Derek S. Speed, senior technologist and technical marketing manager at the Intel Open Source Technology Center. “Moblin 2.0 was considered a ground breaking release while this one is more focused on feedback and making Moblin more of a polished product.”

However polishing the interface is only a small part of the changes in 2.1. Under the covers there are major changes that add API support for features such as 3G wireless data modems, telephony, touch and gesture controls and sensors. These aren’t immediately apparent to users and won’t be until application developers start incorporating them into their applications. But by making them available now to the Moblin community, developers will be able to get a head start on making those new applications happen.

Netbook and Nettop Features

Perhaps the biggest change for users is Moblin Garage, which provides online access to many open source applications free for the downloading.

"There are a lot of existing applications out there for netbooks and nettops because of the high degree of commonality between Moblin and other Linux distributions,” says Speed. “One of the things missing was an easy to use way to find applications which are out there and easily installed. That’s what Garage is all about.”

“On Moblin 2.1 there is an application installer to allow you to browse free, open-source applications. On the back end there’s a repository we host on moblin.org that is constantly adding new applications which automatically show up on the user's device.”

Speed points out that this is separate from the Moblin App Store which is focused on commercial applications. The other difference is that Garage is available now but the App Store is still under development.

The Moblin 2.1 browser is also greatly improved, with the ability to use Firefox plugins with the browser. One of the reasons Firefox is so popular as a browser is the wide range of plugins that add functions to the basic browser, from managing bookmarks to building bibliographies. With 2.1, the Moblin browser will be able to use most of those plugins as-is, and the others can be adapted to Moblin 2.1 by the developers with a minimal amount of tweaking.

One of the other new features aimed at the netbook market is better use of large screens. “Moblin 2.0 was oriented towards nettops with 8 to 10 inch screens,” Speed explains. “There were a few things we needed to do to make the user interface look better on larger screens, so you could include more stuff in Myzone and things like that.”

Moblin 2.1 also provides better support for the Bluetooth wireless communications protocol, especially in pairing (connecting) devices through Bluetooth. In this release of Moblin this feature is targeted primarily at people using Bluetooth headsets to listen to music from their netbook or nettop.

Core Features

In addition to the improvements to features aimed at netbooks and nettops, Moblin 2.1 includes a wide range of additions to the core feature set. Many of these are aimed at developers who are developing applications to run on all types of Moblin enabled devices rather than users.

One of the added core features is 3G support. “A number of netbooks started to come out being sold through network service providers like Verizon and ATT Wireless,” Speed explains. “Their position is you can take it anywhere and get access to the network wherever you are. That’s a key feature OEMs are asking for.” To help companies that want to sell units with 3G modems, Moblin 2.1 adds built-in support for 3G modems.

The first modem supported is from Ericsson but Speed expects other vendors to add support quickly. “That’s driven by demand,” he says. “For this release the most important thing was to get the plumbing in place. Then getting the plugins is a simpler task. “We did Ericsson first because one of our key OEMs is using that specific modem. We expect other support to come from the open source community or from open source vendors based on demand from OEM customers.”

This is in keeping with the Moblin philosophy. “Moblin is not a product, it’s an operating system project,” Speed points out. “The project products come from open source vendors. We do the fundamental technical plumbing and typically a reference implementation and then the community or the open source vendors will pick it up and support specific platforms.”

Another important piece of plumbing included in Moblin 2.1 is for telephony. “The 3G support is aimed at data modems, the telephony stack supports voice, IM and such,” says Speed. He notes, “Intel, Nokia and a few other companies started working on an open source telephony stack called Ofono which has been first integrated into Moblin 2.1.” He explains, “The Ofono concept is similar to the Connman connection manager. Basically it's a framework for supporting telephony. You would plug in specific plugins for specific modems into the framework.”

“This is a new capacity and will continue to mature in the community. It is more targeted to developers now, but it will become more useful with the upcoming MID release of Moblin we’re working on for later this year.”

Currently Ofono is being managed as a separate project with its own web site at ofono.org.

“One of the things we’ve found is that you need to get these new APIs into the hands of developers quickly,” Speed says. “They need time to start creating applications, often prior to the availability of the hardware out there. Part of the philosophy here was to release this stuff early. Then as hardware including Moblin 2.1 starts coming out, there will be applications underway. All they need to do is test them on a specific vendor’s hardware to get it working properly.”

Other examples of this philosophy are Moblin 2.1's support for gesture and sensor technology, which is being released, along with reference implementations in this version of Moblin.

“We’ve taken the first in a series of steps to add support for touch-oriented input into Moblin,” Speed says. “In Version 2 the first market we went after was netbooks and with the vast majority of netbooks the input is a keyboard and some kind of mouse device. One of the things we're finding is that with smaller developers there’s the merging of all kinds of features – touch screens as well as keyboards.”

Version 2.1 only supports single touch gestures rather than multi finger gestures such as pinch and squeeze as found on the iPhone. However this will be expanded in later releases of Moblin.

Version 2.1 also includes a sensor framework. “This is to be able to support all kinds of sensors on platforms, such as accelerometers, ambient light, thermal sensors and compasses. “All types of devices are going on to not just MIDs and smartphones, but onto netbooks too,” Speed says. “The APIs enable them to get access to all types of data coming from sensors.”

According to Speed, Moblin 2.1 represents a true community effort. “This is very much the result of great feedback from the community and OEMs we’re working with,” he says. “In the near future you'll be seeing new models of the netbooks and nettops coming out based on Moblin 2.1”

“It's a pretty exciting preview of things that are coming.”

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