Giants put weight behind Moblin

Moblin is set to get support for Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight

Moblin 2.0, the Linux-based operating system (OS) designed for Atom netbooks, is due to come pre-installed on some Dell netbooks from tomorrow.

Dell turned to Ubuntu creator Canonical to create the Ubuntu Moblin Remix Developer Edition for its Inspiron Mini 10v netbook, and will aim the package at developers.

"Moblin keeps on getting more exciting as a project with new applications and improved user experiences. It's great to be delivering this release with Dell to developers wanting to participate in Moblin," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder and chief executive of Canonical.

"Intel and the Moblin community are bringing tremendous resource and investment into the Linux ecosystem and this product acts as a bridge to Moblin for developers."

Yesterday, Intel demonstrated the next version of the OS, Moblin 2.1, running on a smartphone – highlighting the company's increased focus on the mobile space and its push towards creating a consistent experience across a wide range of devices.

Further highlighting the mobile OS's coming of age it was also revealed, from early next year, Moblin will get support from both Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Air platforms as part of the Intel Atom Developer Program, which will see Intel create an app store framework for developers.

With this support developers can target Silverlight or Air as a preferred client runtime and know they will get solid support on Atom-based devices.

During her keynote at the show, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of Software and Services Group Renee James was joined by Ian Ellison-Taylor, Microsoft's general manager for Client Platforms and Tools to announce the collaboration.

This partnership is expected to help developers write applications once and have them run across Windows and Moblin devices, expanding the reach of Silverlight from the desktop and into mobile consumer electronic devices.

"We see this as a clear extension of our current efforts with Novell where we are building an open source implementation of Silverlight called Moonlight that is targeted at the broad range of Linux–based PCs," said Ellison-Taylor.