Udooz!

This is part 2 of Event Watch: Moblin – Intel’s Mobile Flavour.

After spending two hours, the Mobile Image Creator (MIC) created Moblin environment on my development machine. During these period, it swallow 1GB and after completing all the target environment swallow 600+MB of my hard drive (Hope that each target only took 373.8MB, others are one time update of necessary components).

Okey, let me write about the remaining notes about the seminar. Moblin is nothing but a emulator of the target device. It contains all set of libraries to develop rich interactive, power saved mobile applications. You can develop and deploy your C++/Python source code into the environment.

The lunch was excellent and one of the high attractive point in this seminar.

After the lunch, Thamarai Selvi from Anna University presented a full length of theoretical session about various mobile communication. Its good to her to explain all brief about Wifi, WiMax and other non-matured technologies. But she just forgot that this is neither academic class room nor off-room lecturer.

The final session “Ubuntu in the Mobile Space” was given by Prakash from Canonical, a sponsor of Ubuntu. He provided good and humorous speech about Ubuntu’s Notebook edition (a very thin laptop) and he talked about Ubuntu’s mobile edition Linux on Moblin.

A Simple Hello World! Application
I followed the steps to create a sample Hello World application in Moblin at http://moblin.org/toolkits/prepDev/toolkits_prepDev_useImgCrtr.php.

One very important thing while create project, add target and setting FSets is that please connect your system with a broad band internet connection. It gets lots and lot of things from Moblin.org.

It is pleasure for Intel to give all required components in a separate development CD/DVD kit.

Two things I would like to tell Intel.

1. Atleast provide the entire Moblin kit in a DVD.
2. Be sure what is needed to be conveyed to the large audience, because now you are targeting the developers and you should touch their heart as like as the one and only Microsoft and its various TechEd/TechMela/Day events those are nothing but a magic point on which all developers are focused.

Caution: You have to spend more than two hours when you selected a full target function sets on the selected target. For Samsung full function set It downloads more than 450 components from Internet. What a wonderful repository? Actually, why Intel organized Moblin like this way. God only knows.

This is second time in Chennai, Intel had arranged developer session on their new mobile environment Moblin (Mobile Linux).

Microsoft came into mobile software arena very latetly. Like, Intel also has entered into the mobile hardware market very lately. Surprisingly it comes along “Moblin” platform.

When I had received the registration email from Intel, two things gave me surprise. One is repetition of the event in the same city and the location was Anna University campus. Although the campus was surrounded by old aged trees, I would like to request the university board to improve the ambiance of the campus. One of the sign board informs wrong direction to Muthain Auditorium. At the time I reached the place, the first session was almost in the final stage given by an official from CDAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing). He was talked about pervasive computing. One of my manager and me had a quick chat with him about the public participation on pervasive computing. They do not have any idea about this.

I was started to download the Moblin on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine by following the instruction given at http://moblin.org/toolkits/prepDev/toolkits_prepDev_instImgCrtr.php half hour before writing this post by “git” clone.

Prerequisites:

• git-core (intltoolize also)
• automake
• autotools-dev
• build-essential
• dh-make
• fakeroot
• python
• debootstrap
• syslinux

In Ubuntu 8.04, python and syslinux have already installed. But need to install the remaining using “sudo”. Other than the above, we have to install “curl” and “intltoolize” also by

$ sudo apt-get install curl
$ sudo apt-get install intltool

Note that have to give “intltool”, and not “intltoolize”. After installing the MBs of these prerequisites, I gave the below command to get moblin-creator from moblin.org.

$ git clone http://moblin.org/repos/tools/moblin-image-creator.git

Beware it took more than half hour in my broad band internet connection.

After getting the kit, key the following:

$ cd moblin-image-creator
$ ./autogen.sh
$ sudo make install
$ sudo image-creator

Really I would like to write about the my very fist hello world in Moblin in this post, let us see, since after executing “moblin-image-creator” (simply MIC), and add new platform project, it took more than half hour. It simply said “Please wait while installing HelloMoblin”. Woooop!

Narendra Bhandri from Intel gave session about “Mobility Trends & Moblin Overview”. Its the same old presentation given in the previous seminar. Oops, still MIC retrieving and validating large number of libs and tools. The session was about the internet experience and usability of the current mobile devices. And, of course he talked about Intel’s new processor for mobile devices oh, sorry MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) “Atom” from its famous Centrino platform.

Oo God, still MIC retrieving and validating. This time I found that It start from tool with name starting “a” and in the ascending order. More than 40 minutes over. I did not worry about the time it took, because it completely created the image of Moblin Linux environment. After a while, It extract, unpack and configure various Moblin components. Oh God, my hard drive space. let us see.

Santhosh from Intel gave session about “Software Framework for Mobile Devices”. He directly talked about the Moblin stack. Wait..are you confused about “What is really mean Moblin?”.
Most of the attendees in the hall had the same confusion (may be still), because none of the speaker clearly explain and convey the real aspect of Moblin.

-To be continued on next part (my wife called me thrice to shutdown the system) bye!!