So as promised here’s my fix for all the problems that I have faced.

(Also remember that Moblin is built on top of many other RPM type distros, so you have a yum installer built in, if nothing else then go to command prompt and type sudo yum install xxx ,where xxx is your favorite linux app in Red Hat ,FEDORA or SUSE. The underlying arch in Atom is x86 so all your older binaries should work fine, it’s just that they have been written for pentium processors and would become power hogging monsters on miniscule Atom chips ).

(Update : Just found this wonderful thread in stackoverflow .It discusses how to optimize your code for Atom processors, if someone is really downloading and compiling binaries again, might as well give it a try).

Codec problem

Go to http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/src/ and download the following

• Gstreamer
• Gstreamer base
• Gstreamer good
• Gstreamer bad
• Gstreamer ugly
• Gstreamer ffmpeg

Now run the following on your system

sudo yum install bison flex gcc make diffutils glib2-devel pango-devel cairo-devel liboil-devel alsa-lib-devel libtheora-devel libvorbis-devel libogg-devel

Once you are done, extract all your gstreamer downloads.

Follow these steps.

1. switch to root….(I prefer this to running sudo since I have to type passwords all the time…..and before you ask yes I have edited my /etc/sudoers).

2.go to Gstreamer folder. and run the following

./configure -prefix=/usr then make and then make install

repeat this step for all gstreamer downloads in the following order

• gstreamer basic
• gstreamer good
• gstreamer bad
• gstreamer ugly
• gstreamer ffmpeg

It’s a long process so you better switch to root and run a script to automate all this…on my system it took close to an hour.

Once it’s done you should be able to play all your mp3′s and view all your avi’s although in my case when I was playing one particular video I could only see the video but not the audio, I guess I will have to switch to verbose mode and see which component is missing but this set of codecs covers most of the codecs so it’s good for the average user.

Problem with moblin-media-player

If you still can’t play AV files on the integrated media player you need to un-install the media player by going to Applications->manage apps , look for moblin media player

Then install it again, and you should be able to hear and watch your AV files on it.

NTFS mount problem.

Step 1

• Go to http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsmount
• Download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse/files/fuse-2.X/

Step 2

• Run tar zxvf fuse-2.7.0.tar.gz
• cd fuse-2.7.0
• ./configure and make and sudo make install

Step 3

• Download ntfsprogs from http://www.sfr-fresh.com/linux/misc/ntfsprogs-2.0.0.tar.gz/
• Follow the same steps as with FUSE ,just change the name according to ntfsprogs.

Once done you should be able to use ntfsmount command easily, do a man ntfsmount to learn more.

Also once you have mounted your ntfs drives don’t just plug them out , this will corrupt your config files and lock your drive, (you’ll need to log into windows again otherwise).

use the fusermount command to unmount your drives before you unplug them. Do a man fusermount to learn more.

(Caution : Don’t use the force option with ntfsmount, better go to windows if you have locked your usb drive )

Using Mozilla with Moblin

Look at this site. It works !! , in case you don’t find anything to uninstall don’t worry, follow the rest of the steps.

Also go to favorite apps under applications and look for the browser option. Set it to mozilla.

Getting the chat client to work

Empathy the default chat client with Moblin sucks but it’s the only thing that can be integrated into the Moblin UI so if you’re a sucker for UI then while configuring a new account, select the gtalk option, give your full username xxx@gmail.com in the username and select both SSL and the other option.

set the server to talk.google.com, don’t tick the lowermost checkbox, and don’t touch the port number. Click modify/change and it should get you going.

Though there are still bugs with the UI and you will soon get frustrated, better switch to Pidgin.

So that’s it right now…more on it if I find something.

Chao

Am back on my blog after a long hiatus and it was my experience with the new Moblin OS that compelled me to come here. I bought a ATOM processor + Intel motherboard integrated unit a few months back which Intel touts as what they call a “NET-TOP” , It’s not a fair acronym at all in my opinion since it’s just more than a dumb box with an internet connection, I have managed to run a fair number of games and applications on it, so in my opinion it’s a fairly decent piece of hardware and if you are looking for a low cost ,low power desktop to watch videos, play simple games like AOE, and browse the web atom’s the one for you.

However my biggest complaint has been the lack of support for a proper Linux distro, which is a big problem for me since I run Linux often and like to play around with it. I have tried with all distros starting from Ubuntu to Fedora to Mandrake to Open Suse, throw in a couple of other names as well, but I have been unable to get past the bootloader screen as always. So yesterday when I was able to install Moblin without a glitch I was overjoyed, and on seeing the slick UI I thought all my problems had finally come to an end but that was not to be.

My First impressions

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw Moblin 2.1 was the fact that hey that’s a cool Linux distro, the concept of UI here is different comapred to any other distro around, the whole job of the UI is to get you around with the minimum fuss. In fact it takes some time to get used to it. At first I was like hey where is the terminal ? and where is the file browser ? Is this another clone of Chrome OS which won’t allow me to access my own FS and hardware devices. But on browsing around you ultimately do find all the links, though they are accessible they are neatly hidden to give the layman user a feeling of not using a Linux machine at all.