Moblin 2.0 Being Released At Intel IDF

At OSCON 2008, Linux on mobile devices has been an extremely hot topic. This morning Intel's Dirk Hohndel had keynoted about their Atom-based mobile devices and netbooks and this afternoon he had a smaller session where he talked in greater detail about Moblin and what will be known as Moblin 2.0.

Moblin 1.0 was released a year ago as a place for the Linux and open-source communities to collaborate over Linux on mobile devices. Moblin will run on most any mobile device, but Intel's interest with Moblin is to push along their mobile devices (now their Atom processors / Menlow platform).

Moblin 2.0 will contain a number of enhancements, but most significantly it's going to be based on Fedora. Up to this point, Canonical and Intel have been very close and Moblin has been based upon Ubuntu/Debian. However, with Moblin 2.0 this is all out the door. Re-basing against Fedora is being done for technical merits and in particular Intel being interested in using an RPM-based distribution. One of the examples cited by Dirk was the ability for RPMs to easily identify the license of packages and being able to build an environment including or excluding a particular license type. Dirk had also added Debian-based distributions can still participate, but they'll have an added one-step process of the RPM to Debian package conversion.

The first alpha release of Moblin 2.0 is due out in a few weeks and we've heard through our sources that Intel is planning for unveiling this new mobile Linux platform revision at their Intel Developer Forum (IDF) next month. The next Intel Developer Forum is in San Francisco from the 19th to 21st of August.