"Another promising feature of Moblin2 is Connman. It's a bit
difficult to test it out completely, because only a smattering of
WiFi card firmware was included in the Moblin2 alpha release
yesterday. But frankly, almost anything would be an improvement
over Network Manager.
"In fairness, Network Manager has actually done an amazing job
of evolving with the deep changes that have been happening in
Linux's kernel with regard to networking and especially WiFi cards
over the last couple of years. But now that things are starting to
settle (no udev pun intended there), perhaps it's time for a new
ground-up approach. For now, the approach of the day seems to be
Connman. Have a look.
"Yet, what really won me over, in playing around with the Moblin
2 alpha, was the insanely fast boots. Running qemu in software only
(no hardware virtualization support), it booted in under a minute
on my run-of-the-mill system. Running from an el-cheapo USB key on
a Core2 Duo laptop and PC, it boots in a couple of seconds (!),
with most of that seemingly taken up by generating a whole bunch of
security keys (really, did I need *four* ssh host keys?) that
wouldn't have to be recreated each time, in an installed system. To
know more about it, maybe see our earlier coverage, or else run
strings on the binary read-ahead-packed file in /etc."