[ILUG] Yet another linux distro..

[Glen Gray]

On 8 Jul 2009, at 15:13, Shane Tuohy wrote:

> I could see this being nice to have as a secondary OS, something to  
> boot
> into quicky when you just want to check your mail or a few things on  
> the
> net. It'll apparently boot up really quickly so you'd be on the net  
> really
> quick.
>
> Although, with boot speed being one of Ubuntus main priorities these  
> days,
> aiming for a 10 second boot, maybe you won't need it.
>

Given the info we do have, I think that there's going to be some  
correlation between this netbook GoogleOS and Android. At least some  
tech sharing. It was mentioned that it'll have it's own windowing  
system. I see there being 2 options then, it either relies on standard  
kernels and KMS for intel drivers etc. or it reuses the frame-buffer  
windowing system from Android. i.e. No X. The later is probably more  
likely if they're targeting ARM as well as x86.

Also, considering their work on the NaCl project (http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ 
) we could be in for something more like Android than Ubuntu.

As a result the boot time is going to be less than 5 seconds I'd  
guess. For example, the majority of time in a Moblin boot sequence is  
actually the BIOS and launching the Moblin-UX ui applications, not the  
kernel and X.

Originally I was sure that they'd be basing a distro off of Ubuntu.  
But the more I think about it, the more likely this is to be less a  
typical generic linux distro and more like an Android type release.

Certainly looking forward to what gets released later in the year.
--
Glen Gray
slaine at slaine.org