And while it may be a step in the write direction, there are a few little things that just bug me about the current iteration of the Moblin netbook distribution.
- Power Button – Where is it? The short answer is there isn’t one – your only option is to simply use the physical power button on your netbook. Also, the shutdown terminal command is strangely absent. Thankfully, though, the reboot command is still there. It would be excellent if Shutdown/Reboot/Sleep were included in the options presented when you click the battery status icon.
- myzone – There’s no way to customize the myzone tab, which is the default location on start up. You get three columns, and no control of them or choice in adding other quick content. Not very handy for a start page, in my opinion.
- Persistence – The detailed instructions page that tells you how to put Moblin on a flash drive/SD card/whatever doesn’t explain how to add a persistence layer so that your changes survive a reboot. All of the instructions/utilities supplied simply bite-copy the image to your device and that’s that. Supposedly you can use the Fedora LiveUSB Creator to do this, but I’ve yet to try it. Having an official utility would help, and something that I hope to see coming down the road.
So for the time being, Moblin is something that’s neat to play around in – it has an amazing interface that’s refreshing and definitely easy to use for Linux (or computer-in-general) newbies – but still has some growing to do before I’d use it in place of a full distribution.
With any luck, they’ll work on these things for the final version of Moblin 2, or if not that, than hopefully for Moblin 3.
Edit: Also useful information, the root password for Moblin 2 is ‘moblin’. And for some reason, although sudo is installed by default, the standard user (also ‘moblin’) isn’t in the /etc/sudoers file, so you can’t use sudo unless you manually add it. That needs to get fixed as well.
