Saturday, May 23, 2009

So, how's Moblin v2.0 Beta shaping up on the 901?

Well, it's OK, but as I mentioned yesterday, this really is geared towards the type of person who wants to just use the OS for apps.
If, like me, you'd really prefer to be fiddling around and experimenting and trying new things, then you'll be disappointed.
But given that >95% of the worlds computer (and possibly future netbook users are going to want exactly this,then Moblin is likely to look very attractive.
However, I'm not sure how it'd compare with UNR or Windows XP, but remember that Moblin is still in Beta so it seems there's more to come.
One thing I confirmed today was that the built-in browser, which seems to be an early version of Google Chrome for Linux, is, well, crap. It's very slow, uses that quite mistaken version of Opera's speeddial where it provides icons for your last used or most popular sites, and the download function doesn't work.
In particular, I couldn't download Adobe Flash Player so no YouTube and Gmail complained about lack of flash.
Luckily Minefield (aka Firefox) is available in Applications>>Other. Here the download works. So, I availed of this opportunity to download Opera as before the static version errors out but the shared version works fine. Specifically, I used opera-10.00-4102.gcc4-shared-qt3.i386.tar.gz
This installed without problem and works fine.
An icon of sorts (not the usual Opera icon) shows up in both m_zone and Apps>>Other.
Zones is a nice feature which allows you to quickly switch from one app to another. However, I really don't believe it's as good as the AWN (or similar) docks.
Also, up to now I haven't been able to get a small (6 MB) .mp3 audio file to play in the Media Player even though an .ogg file that comes with the OS plays fine. Basically, I just tried clicking on it in the file browser but nothing happened.
Then when I converted this .mp3 file to .ogg, it was recognised by the Audio section of the Media Player and played without problem.
Interesting too is that in File Browser, each .ogg file will start playing when moused over.
To convert from .mp3 to .ogg I used this command

mpg321 input.mp3 -w - | oggenc -o output.ogg -

Here's where I found it. Note that to get it to work in a terminal, you'll need to download vorbis-tools and mpg123 before hand.

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