Moblin v2.0 Beta for netbooks released, sports new UI

Intel has just announced that the Moblin v2.0 Beta is now out. The improvements are quite significant and include a completely revamped user interface, faster boot time (<10 seconds), longer battery life and smaller memory footprint. The new UI has a homepage called M-zone, which stands for "My" zone (screenshot below). It has been designed from the ground up and includes social networking features such as status updates. There is also instant access to calendar, tasks and appointments as well as recently used files.

There’s also a new media player, with support for UPnP streaming and USB devices, a new connection manager now with GUI. The M-Zone will be customisable for OEMs. The interface can be seen in action in a video after the break.

Moblin is a Linux based operating system, originally created by Intel, but recently handed over control the independent Linux Foundation. The Moblin Linux kernel was created to be a fast and lightweight platform, specifically designed to run on Intel Atom-based netbooks. The free download is a 321MB file available here.