The other day when I installed Moblin back onto my Macbook with VMware, I just sort of went the route of set it, and forget it. I didn’t spend a lot of time playing, and didn’t pay a whole lot of attention either. I noticed the interface had changed, and like it, but that was about the extent of it.

Now I hear about it being slow, and I just went back to play and see WTF. Sure enough too, the UI was slow, and not very responsive. The rollover effects on the menu bar icons take about 2.5 seconds to go from down to over states, and the load time of the OS is considerably slower than before.

First thing I did was throw more RAM at it, 1gb in fact. No diff. So then I added the second virtual process and kicked the RAM to 1.3gb. Still nothing. I tired installing the VMware Tools, but they don’t see to go, and I haven’t gotten any further than that. There are visual issue too. The menu bar doesn’t span the width of the screen, so icons overlap – even if I up the resolution.

It’s still in beta, so I’m not really hashing on it – but it is buggy and the latest updates to the UI seem to have affected the function of it. At least on a VM, and that may be an issue all unto itself. Still, I have to hesitate to put it on my netbook for fear of these issues being present there as well.

I decided a couple of days ago to rebuild my new Acer Aspire One to run on Moblin 2. Yeah, I know it’s only in Alpha, but I have it on my Mac, and it seemed cool so I jumped in and did it. It installed great from the USB drive I have. After using unetbootin to get it on there, it takes about 8 minutes to get the lappy up and running – and everything works right out of the can. Except Flash. I can’t install anything at all. Not as my user account, not as root.

Come to find out my user isn’t in the sudoers file, and everything I try to get it there fails or bricks the install. I messed around with it for a while, rebuilt it a couple of times with no luck, so I go after the Ubuntu option. Naturally Ubuntu installs flawlessly but with no wifi. Gah! Everything I try fails me, and after trying 8.o4, I brick the install with a kernel panic. Double Gah!

So now, I’m back to Moblin and no Flash. Or Pidgin. It’s bummin’ me out man…..

I’m not giving up though. There’s good info on getting 8.10 on an Aspire One, but I just can’t get the wifi to work. I would be fine with Moblin if I could get myself into the sudoers file though. I could install what I need and be done with it. I’ve read a lot about visudo, but I can’t install it and it doesn’t seem to be on the Moblin install. I’m at an inpass right now.

Oh yeah, and I can’t go back to the XP on there since it came with no discs, not like that’s a huge deal, not a huge fan of Windows any way, but this is turning out ot be more of a chore than I thought…..

Just tonight I ran across the moblin project that the good folks over at Intel are working on and it sounds too good to be true. Boot times are insanely fast – like 5 seconds, and the download is impossibly small at 264mb. Well from what I have seen so far, this thing is pretty dang sweet.

First, I simply boot from the ISO on my lappy, and BAM! around 7 or so seconds later I have it running. Sweet! If only Windows could load 10 times slower I would be happy, happy, happy. So now I want to install it to run under VMware Fusion, can't be that hard – I already have Windows 7 and Ubuntu running…. After about 20 minutes of playing around with the OS selector, I get it to install (sans kernal panics) using the FreeBSD option. The thing that caught me up to start with though was having to allocate the disk – first. Without the disk allocated, it wouldn't see the virtual drive. Now it's running like a champ.

I think it's official that I have crossed over the transgeekridion line, I mean not even 1 minute after I read something about a super slim, quick version of Linux for netbooks, I download it and try to get it running on my Mac. I would have tried on my desktop by it runs an AMD chip, so I figured it might implod or something equally as obsidious.

You can get the source code to create custom images all to you own liking using the Moblin Image Creator (or MIC2  if you prefer) if you are of the uber-geek variety, or just download prebuilt ISOs and run with the fun from there. I opted for door number three simply because I like instant gratification.

The netbook trend is very exciting to me, and I have been trying to come up with a good excuse to get a netbook for a couple of months now – I mean come on! For $350 bucks, why not – hell, get two they're cheap. Any way, yay for Intel -moblin is way cool and chock full of potential.

Just in time for the holidays, Amazon has launched their OLPC Program today enabling the world to get an XO if they Give One.These are actually pretty sweet little lappys if you are in the mood to shell out $400 bucks to get your $200 laptop. I've seen a couple in action, and they seem to work pretty well, and they are small and very portable.

For the longest time I thought getting one of these would be cool, but with the influx of inexpensive 8" and 9" laptops lately, it hardly makes sense if you take away the donating factor. But since the XO is being switched to accommodate Windows XP, I would rather wait, or just get something else and donate money to funds directly. You can even get a little Acer Aspire One at Walmart, Staples and of course Amazon for as little as $395.00, not to mention all of the other little guys out the from ASUS and Sony. Although the Sony lappys are insanely expensive.

I still think about getting an OLPC see though whenever I see ads for programs and articles for it. It would be a fun little gadget to have, just because of what it is.