While covering OSCON, The Register has an article outlining Intel's switch from Ubuntu to Fedora as a base Linux distribution for Moblin. For those who had missed it, I covered the Ubuntu Mobile and Moblin relationship previously. It is currently unclear what this decision means to Ubuntu Mobile. I'll have to ask Canonical.
The Register points to an official decision to switch from .deb package management to .rpm package management. From their interview: "Dirk Hohndel, Intel's director of Linux and open-source strategy, told The Reg there was no falling out with Ubuntu, but the move to Fedora was a technical decision based on the desire to adopt RPM for package management."
Later in the article, there is a more telling reply: "The other thing we thought about was Moblin one wasn't successful in creating this community push - having a vibrant community push is the winning factor."
This brought to mind images of Steve Ballmer chanting. It's all about the developers and the community. Ubuntu is my favorite desktop Linux, but apparently the Ubuntu team did not bring that level of excitement to the MID platform. Intel wants more. Could you blame them? This is something that needs a great deal of community drive if it ever intends to get from board rooms to shelves.
If they really want developer and community excitement, they should make a hybrid operating system and cross-compilation toolchain for Nokia's maemo platform which would allow Nokia developers to simply compile their existing source against it. In these comments, it seems Internet Tablet owners are already clamoring for a larger, more powerful version of the same thing.
The Link vs. moblin image above is from ZeldaDungeon.
1 comments:
Dirk posted some clarification to The Register article in a blog on Intel.com. It clarifies some of what he meant in his keynote.
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