An Intel guy was at SCaLE 8x this year talking about MeeGo. From what he was saying, a lot of the partnership is still conceptual. He was running Moblin 2.x on his notebook that was displaying the presentation and I like the interface, but he wasn't at liberty to discuss much on whether it will use one interface over the other. They had some mock-ups of what it will look like and it retains the Moblin style but they wouldn't confirm if that was how it would stay. They also had very little info regarding security, applications, or features. I am curious WHAT they are releasing this month and and I am quite sure it will not be what is finally released.

Yes, I am looking forward to the release. I like having dual boot machines, it's like getting two computers in place of one.

On XP my ASUS EEE 1001AH is okay, it stutters sometimes, takes a while to boot and sometimes locks up. But okay is the right word for it.

Ubuntu is better than XP, codecs available for quicktime and flash, quicker boot than XP. Opensuse looked really good but the restore session feature meant that at one one point it could not get past the boot up.

But purpose-built OSs such as Moblin boot much faster, the machine is much snappier, like it has a different personality. But Moblin could not play all the media I like and it did not take long for dependancy problems to make it un-updateable.

Android would not boot on it. Right now I've got JoliCloud. I am impressed. Fast, effective. Still missing a lot of codecs and the flash won't install. But this is beta release.

What else should I try? I've still got the XP restore CD so even if I trash the install I can go back to the beginning.

I have an Eee PC 900a netbook which has a 4GB SSD and it will be interesting to see what they come up with. I heard good things about moblin on the atom, but loading it into my netbook via flashdrive failed so I hope they fix that problem (most netbooks don't have an optical drive so flashdrive or SD card are the only install options). I'm using easypeasy right now and its much better than the bloated OEM Xandros and seems to be more compatible with my mouse pad than regular ubuntu. I could never fix the jumpy mouse pad problem under ubuntu.

Moblin looked very nice but, alas, it was not very productive. there were issues with the wireless and most of the Fn keys on my samsung NC10 so i dropped it. I got involved in the project itself with the translations but everything seemed very disorganised and the leader of the project had no idea what was going on in other areas of development and nothing about the merger and is going to happen now. I like the fact that the project gets a serious backing from Nokia so hopefully things move forward. I would have preferred them to keep the Moblin name instead of this MeeGo, which sounds plain silly.
I will certainly try it on, but for now, I am sticking with Jolicloud and Ubuntu (ok, I confess, i also kept the windows, but only because I have some expensive windows software installed).

I tried Moblin awhile back, and left unimpressed.

Jolicloud seems to deliver where Moblin falls short. I'm eagerly anticipating the final release.

I dont look forward to MeeGo because Im happy with the various Linux I have on our 4 netbooks at home but having used Moblin, it is nice and sleek and Im sure will appeal to the smartphone crowd.
I think that the fact that Nokia partnered up with Intel is important though because of the role both companies play in their fields.
Let's not forget that Nokia also is HEAVILY involved in Linux through their Qt framework which is the foundation of the KDE desktop so its not like they dont have a clue in this field.

I have no use for diminished OS like Android and MeeGo obecause I do too many things on my netbook but for some people those limited operating systems will be plenty for smartphones, handhelds, tablets, MIDs and smartbooks, and competition is a GOOD thing.

Since we use KDE at home, I tried the KDE4.4 netbook offering and I prefer it much more to last years Plasma-based custom netbook options they had come out with and it looks like it will be the one we will most likely use.

IMHO, any netbook *nix user should be interested in this merger and more specifically in the product, MeeGo, as light-weight and easy to use linux systems are very high in popularity amongst users.
On my MSI, I ran Win7 and Jolicloud and I spent 50% of my netbook time on each. They are both fast to boot, easy to install and required no tweaking (except for downloading some drivers) for the hardware to be fully functional. In joli I have some trouble with skype and citrix. Off topic: I am really shocked at how well Windows 7 work on the MSI (speed, stability).

My short experience with Moblin 2.1 was that is was somewhat buggy (I used the Dell version since it allows for easily accessing the console and package manager) and shortly after that I switched to Jolicloud for my linux os.