Moblin – Linux on mobile devices

I found this project (I did remember to have read about it before, but I didn’t pay so much attention) browser into the o-hands‘ website. I use to check each some time their projects, I like them 🙂

Well, moblin is an interesting project from Intel, defined by them as:

“Moblin’s architecture is designed to support multiple platforms, such as Netbooks and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), and various embedded usage models, such as In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. Most of the software stack is a platform and usage model-independent layer we call “Moblin Foundations,” that provides one uniform way to develop applications for such usage models. Below the Moblin Foundations layer are the Linux Kernel and device drivers specific to the platform. On top of the Moblin Foundations layer are the specific applications, user interfaces, and user interaction models for the target device.”

Actually they have a lot of work done about different parts of a Linux distribution for mobile devices. No just for the intel processors ones, but other small devices.

They have tools for building the distro (with pyGtk UI), user interfaces based on clutter, support for fedora and ubuntu based distros and some stuff more.

I more interesting on the user interface thing (I use to think and chat a lot with my good friend Alberto about better user experience) and the building system. The building system is called moblin-image-creator (a.k.a. MIC).

I’m very interesting on this MIC because I know well the building systems (I wrote myself some before. For Metadistros, Guadalinex, etc) and I was working with the ones from Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Morphix, Linux-Live and more. I like that stuff.

And it pretty interesting this one and his approach, so I like to help as much I can. By now I just send some patches which fixed some minor (but some times blocker) bugs and I’m doing the Spanish translation for the GUI. But I think the system need some improvement and some help the go smooth.

I’m trying to use it for a project at work, that’s why now I become more interested on it. I need to set up a very small distro for a small VIA processor device. I just meet to run a Java (with GUI) application there, so I tried to fit into the distro the less software is possible to run over the X the java application.

I got some problems with the MIC building that distro, because there was some issues with Ubuntu based distros, with virtualisation (I haven’t before the machine, so I had to run on kvm the images for testing) and some more. But I fix some of them and I’ll trying to fix the other as soon as posible (I need it for my project).

But, actually, I’m using MIC and working on it, no just for my work’s project, but because I like the project 🙂 I see it interesting and with a lot of posibilities and I like to bring the experience I’ve adquired during all these years to help the project.

I hope I can find time enough for that… :-/

Well, I got my bugzilla account, I join in the project, in the mail list, I create my git clone of the their repo to work in the project easily, so I’m ready to fight 🙂

Anyone else? 😉