Intel, Nokia aim to unify mobile Linux ecosystem with MeeGo
Ryan Paul is Ars Technica's guy with his finger on the Maemo pulse. His article on MeeGo features the well-thought through analysis we've come to expect from him, covering the business; technical and community aspects of the merger. On the technical front, he says, although Maemo and Moblin are built around a similar philosophy, there are a number of key technical differences that could be difficult to reconcile. The developers who are committed to the respective platforms have very strong feelings about the underlying technology, which could create some friction as the two platforms are brought together. Ryan concludes that MeeGo has the potential to become the standard unifying base for future mobile Linux platforms.
Impact of MeeGo on Mer: just a bunch of redshirts?
Carsten Munk, maemo.org distmaster and Mer project lead, had something of the rug pulled out from underneath him with the MeeGo announcement. The aims of MeeGo as a project overlap completely with the mission statement of Mer. However, the other hope for Mer was a modern OS backported to the N8x0 series of devices. For this, he'll now be trying to produce Mer^2 - by whatever means necessary: Mer as a system will live on in Mer^2. A quick summary is it is a Debian 5.0 system building inside OBS with tricks making it feel like a Scratchbox for the packages, which makes most of the Fremantle platform build on it. It will work on X86 and on N8x0. Mer 0.17 will be imaged up soon and published - those who want to continue with that can. The goal is not to make a fully open source system - it will serve purpose to be a foundation on which to build a backport of Fremantle for N8x0. The hope is to be able to build most of closed things for Fremantle for N8x0 using this.
Who still uses N8x0? What would you like to see in the OS?
Shortly before the MeeGo announcement, but after our issue was pinned down (what could change in the next 12 hours, I thought), Carsten Munk asked what direction N800 and N810 users would like to see Mer taken in. With the MeeGo announcement, this thread shaped into the direction of Mer^2.
Maemo 5 PR1.1.1 (3.2010-02-8) now available
Nokia has released a small update to Maemo 5 which brings changes to apt and the Application Manager to support paid Ovi Store content, the addition of OpenGL ES 1.1 libraries, additional country support, a number of browser bug fixes, and a number of fixes related to battery life (primarily addressing WiFi issues).
"Maemo 6" to be released under the MeeGo brand
As mentioned on the front page, Quim Gil confirmed that "Maemo 6" will be referred to as MeeGo in Nokia's marketing literature. Harmattan is still the codename, and development priorities, timescales and implementation details haven't changed. To be clear: this is not about "ditching" or "abandoning" any platform. The Harmattan program keeps working with the same plans than last week, no matter the name of the product they will deliver. Maemo 6 and Moblin 2.x merge and have a successor called MeeGo. Current Maemo people will look at it and will say "looks like his mother!". Current Mblin people will look at it and will say "looks like his father!" (or choose your preferred gender) Of course you will see changes compared to Maemo 5, but these changes were coming anyway with Maemo 6. This seems likely to lead to a lot of confusion (especially with platform and certain application developers) since platform similarity between Harmattan and MeeGo will be limited.
PUSH N900 Showcase interviews and videos
The complete set of videos from January's PUSH N900 hardware-hacking competition showcase are now online. matt brawn says, There's short interviews with all the teams, some shots of those pole-dancing robots and the robot DJ as well as a good overview of the event as a whole. And don't forget, we'll be announcing the three teams of finalists for MOD IN THE USA that will be building their hacks over the next month to present at CTIA 2010, this coming Monday.
Ubuntu Mobile 9.04 on N900
The Ubuntu Mobile UI, running in LXDE, can be run on Mer as easily as the more Maemo-familiar hildon-desktop. Aston Dsouza has published a video: Here is ubuntu mobile 9.04 on n900 with LXDE desktop. Its installed natively on the MicroSD card and runs at a good speed too.