Thank you for all of the wonderful information you’ve provided regarding W7. For all of the up to date information on all things W7 related, including Netbook issues, it’s best to view them directly at the Windows 7 support forum. The site will also give you all sorts of useful information, such as the “what’s new in the RC” feed….or you can also use talkingaboutwindows.com as an additional resource
Thanks,

v-glferg@microsoft.com

I think Canonical is smart to cover as much bases as possible. I also think they are working on an ARM port. Things seem to be jostling amongst the various platforms available but I hope Ubuntu will survive it.

When Moblin moved from the Ubuntu kernel to a fedora kernel and switched from .debs to rpm packaging format..was that done out of an abiding patience?

You want to call my analysis crap..I’m cool with that as long as you make a real effort to point out why its crap. Feel free to substantiate an alternative interpretation with authoritative information. Feel free to point to counterpoint factual information instead of innuendo and buzzwords. If I have the details wrong point it out specifically.

-jef

I know they are trying to spread out and grab market but when simple things dont work it just makes Linux and Ubuntu look bad.

For instance, Netbook remix. I like it, think its a slick idea but on my MSI Wind U100 it runs like crap. The worst of it being that when I switch between full Desktop and Netbook Remix Desktop from there on out the machine is almost un useable. Its so bad on the video and sound front that I would rather use a hacked version of Mac OS X because its more stable.

They need to step their game up.

Yes..wouldn’t it be grand if Canonical got everything for free. They do their best work when someone else is doing the heavy lifting of actually writing functional code.

The android.git.kernel.org tree exists and is public. Things are being mainlined as a matter of course. Things are slightly more complicated in that the arm port of the linux kernel isn’t exactly the same as the mainline codebase that gets talked about most frequently. Linux for ARM is a port, and that porting effort has its own development processes. The “mainline” kernel itself doesn’t target ARM as far as I am aware. Just like MIPS, ARM support is a “port.” It shouldn’t be taken as a forgone conclusion that ARM specific bits will show up in the mainline kernel tree that linus manages as his tree doesn’t try to be the one tree for all possible hardware targets.

These are all nuances…the main point is that the Android devs are doing their work against kernels tagged as stable and not the latest kernel. Canonical may have to forward port some things into the kernel that karmic ends up using or deliberately hold their ARM kernels back and use exactly what android is using.

The question remains however… why is Canonical so far behind android in terms of ARM support? They knew ARM netbooks were going to show up. They even rolled out a press release trumpeting the fact they were going to start working on ARM.
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/arm-linux

Canonical sold itself in that press release as being the company that could help OEMs bring product to market the fastest. What happened? Why aren’t they living up to the press release performance promise? How long can the ARM OEM netbook market wait for Canonical to get into gear on ARM platform support? Google isn’t Xandros, Canonical is going to have a much harder time swooping into the ARM market later in the game and trying to displace Android like it did by coming into the intel netbook market months after Xandros/Asus.

-jef

Google just has a lot of code and Linux kernel people don’t like to swallow a big chunk in one go, instead preferring to integrate improvements in a series of smaller patches. Google has been working on that. This is going to take sometime.

Integrating the ARM specific patches from Android into the newer kernel Ubuntu is targetting for Karmic may take more work than Canonical has on hand in their kernel team.

Jef, you mentioned that the Android kernel is slow moving and that it has very good Arm support. Why hasn’t the Android work on Arm Linux entered the main kernel tree? Is Google keeping the patches out of tree or has the kernel team rejected Google’s work? (I’m not up to snuff on kernel stuff).

In an ideal OSS setting these patches should already be in the main tree and Canonical would get them “for free” by using the next upstream kernel. It has me wondering what is going on here.

I think canonical seems to be making that niche it wanted, needs and somewhat got. Afterall, you can now go dell w/ubuntu …

Then something “happened” and intel decided to re-orient moblin v2 using rpm based packaging instead…and as a result of that started making use of OpenSuse’s build infrastructure for image building.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/23/moblin_reworked/

Personally I think there some yet to be told story about the thawing of business relationship between Intel and Canonical concerning the evolution of Moblin. I’d add the word scandalous, but since we are talking about technology companies the reasons for the separation is probably far more practical and sobering tallying of ROI than it is scandalous.

If Moblin2 ends up being more successful in terms of building a contributing community to move the platform forward, without close involvement of Canonical whereas moblin1 was not a success even though Canonical was more involved..what does that really say about Canonical’s ability to build and lead a strong vibrant open community?

-jef