MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

(full post at http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/mee...er/484215.html)

Those around who might remember Mer - Maemo Reconstructed - a project/proposal to open up Maemo with open software and an open way of working.. well, it's back, this time as MeeGo Reconstructed, aiming at continuing MeeGo and ultimately becoming MeeGo 2.0.

It aims at keeping & continuing the best parts of MeeGo while doing away with the worst parts and adding some new bits on top, like making it much easier to port to new devices.

Those interested in participating or asking questions, feel free to pop into #mer on freenode!

I look forward to seeing my N900 running the MeeGo UX on top of Mer in the near future.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

a blog post (by yours truly) explaining a little more about Mer: http://blog.rburchell.com/2011/10/me...ction-and.html

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

I read your blog and it was refreshing to read, comes across with real intent without being pushy so a big thumbs up to you.

But i got a question.........

Will stskeeps have anything to do with this?.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Yes, Mer is his 'baby' originally. I'd say it'll be quite a bigger playground with so many interested folks now, but of course he'll be there.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Then will you please reiterate to him that for meego to be recognised and people to have faith, it MUST be capable of more than it is right now.

Many people have lost faith because of the limitations it has and after such a long time.

I want to see meego succeed where Maemo failed and i am serious about this.

I said to you before about the N9 and i meant what i said in that everyone who buys the N9 will have expectations of meego from there on and if the adaption does not match the meego installs of the N9 then it will fail miserably.

This is not a dig in any way it is a request for a better meego experiance for the N900 and i wish you and stskeeps all the best with this and just hope it pulls through this time.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Will this be limited to the N900? Limited to Nokia products?

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Limited to whatever people want to put it on. MeeGo Handset CE is already rebasing on top of it, so that's N900/N950/N9, I guess someone will have a generic x86 adaptation pretty soon if there isn't one already (it should be doable by picking up the pieces from MeeGo itself)...

It's probably also possible to get it booting on a larger range of devices, since Mer (unlike MeeGo) is building for a much wider range of architectures, not just armv7

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Thumbs up for this project.

Hope to see you guys take full advantage of MeeGo CE's work. Love the fact that Qt is onboard.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Yessssssssss..... This is what we all want...

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Mer. great! finally the puzzle pieces are getting into place. : ) !
all the best team! being a Meego CE early adapter for long time..i cant wait for this!

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Voilà... http://codex.xiaoka.com/pub/mer/ ^_^

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

This is awesome! :d

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Sadly, I do.
Wish you better luck than the last time.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

I'd greatly prefer if the project was going to have closer ties to Debian (i.e. more Maemo than Moblin). They have extensive experience with maintaining a non-commercial mutli-arch distro and know how to persist (18 years!)...unlike most of these mobile Linux projects, sadly.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

N900 was a miracle in the field of experiments & personally i still see load of potential in this great device ,i have been watching meego 1.3 closely and i hope it improves more n more as the day passes ,meego team are our heroes !! mainly stskeeps !!

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Great, have you run this on your Ideapad?

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Assuming that smoku's work *has* taken a lot from MeeGo 1.3, it should be fine. We had MeeGo CE images for x86 for the Fall release, and they run beautifully on ideapads

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

So, how's this going to go?

IMO, this mobile distro should be as upstream as possible. It should also be kept nice and small as far as base system is concerned: kernel + init + shell + coreutils + misc utils + package manager.

I'd personally like to see an almost Desktop Linux like thing going on: one base OS, with multiple spins (think Ubuntu - Mergnome? KMer? eMer?) and each spin having many different hardware configurations.
(for end-users: choose your board type e.g. RX-51, modify/keep a suggested kernel config, select DE, add apps and you're ready to go)

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Actually, kernel is a part of Mer's Hardware Adaptation, not Mer's Core.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

A few thoughts and questions...
Can Meego be classed as a distro in its own right, yet? Or, is it still a derivative of Maemo & Moblin? Apart from targetting small devices is it more similar to Fedora or Debian - might it make sense to partner/align/pool with the more more mature distro that it's most like?

To achieve mass-market penetration of any OS, it's probably necessary for that OS to be pre-loaded on devices. Teaming up with a h/w vendor to have a Meego device seems unlikely at the moment but it may happen. So, in the mean time Meego needs to be really adaptable so it can be used to replace Android/Windows/other and make use of as many h/w features as possible as well as being competitive on the s/w front (e.g. geo-location, OCR, speech recognition, office s/w, games, etc, etc). A lot to expect!

In terms of using the OS, for handsets, there is a real opportunity to offer a nearly full linux distro which, can work really well with a touch-friendly UI (e.g. Cordia) or, when required serve as a slimmed down desktop computer (e.g. EasyDebian); and, as technology advances, the desktop capabilites will be able to be expanded.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Will any of this run on a Nokia N800?

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Already runs on N810:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AEKIXVeBGY

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Has it been running on an N800, though? I seem to recall that things weren't 100% compatible for a while between the two when Mer and MeeGo were being worked on--at least at the beginning when I was watching it more closely--which is specifically the reason why I'm asking.

The video is great to watch--booting, but how usable is it?

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Not very, but at least it boots.

It's just a core, you'd have to get a user interface on top yourself - or take one that exists around.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Has anyone looked into that X fix you mentioned might help wrt usability?

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

From what you have said i still do not understand how it will be available for "whatever people want to put it on".

For meego to be usable on any device it must have all the needed hardware drivers of that particular device so i just dont get it right now because the meego.ce was nothing more than a very basic ui with hardly any use on the N900.

Meego as as OS is what is on the N9 and as an example for any adaptation for a particular device it includes all the drivers for the N9's hardware.

It is all well and good talking about meego but unless it takes care of and drives all components in whatever device it is to be installed on, it is of no use whatsoever.

Hence why todate it just does not work for the N900.

My question is ... WHAT device is this going to be developed for?.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Okay, so let's say I'm a device hacker. I have $mysterious_device. I want to get rid of $crappy_os and put something nice, open, and hackable on there. I take Mer, I create a "hardware adaptation" repository for $mysterious_device, then I create an image pulling in both Mer and packages for hardware adaptation, and if all goes well, I have an image that will boot, start a display, and not do much else.

I decide that having a black screen is all very interesting but I'd actually like to put something on it, so then I go pick a UX project (MeeGo CE or Plasma Active or Cordia or something else), and drop them into my image building configuration, build a new image, if all goes well - when I install it - I have an image that boots to display and then starts that UX.

That is: by "everyone", it's "everyone who is a device hacker or hardware vendor" - people who aren't will be relying on these people to build them images, or have to learn to do so themselves.

(Getting the picture a bit more now?)

You're confusing a few different things here, one is the UI (CE) with the device adaptation. They're seperate things for us, although in MeeGo they were combined (which wasn't such a great thing for various reasons).

Have you tried CE 1.3 by the way? It's still pretty basic, of course - but things are improving: see also things like http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=78531

What (in CE) doesn't work on the n900? Camera, SMS, calling, and other basics work out of the box, AFAIK, and if they don't, that's a bug and needs fixing.

Mer has no specific device target. It's a reusable core for hackers to put on any device they want. So far, with various device adaptations, it's already running on generic x86 (things like the ideapad and exopc), n900, n950, n9. It also boots on the n810.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

So, what would make me a device hacker?
And what is the hardware adaption part. Can
I (or any N9(50) owner) use the mer core, already?
I followed the meego ce wiki page, but I could find
the mentioned bootloader (moslo) for booting th N950
meego ce image.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

You'd have to be someone wanting to work on hardware adaptation, i.e. kernel, drivers, getting it actually booting..

I'm not the best person to answer this, so I'll let Stskeeps or someone else take it.

MeeGo CE has already booted on top of Mer. Repositories and so on for device adaptations will be coming soon I guess - give people a chance to work things out. N9/N950 support is waiting on MOSLO from Nokia at the moment, hopefully coming real soon now™ (or someone may have to find a way around it ...)

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

I want to know something i do not understand about meego.

Is meego an OS or is it a UI or GUI ?.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

MeeGo *was* everything mixed up in one, and it paid the price for it. That's one of the mistakes we want to avoid.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Thankyou Woot for being a gentleman and answering me.

OK now i understand fully why meego has never been successful.

If you want to develop meego to be recognised by anyone who will use it then it MUST be capable as an operating system if it is to even run properly.

As a UI/GUI it must be capable of working with the OS it is being used with or it will fall flat on its face.

What has happened is very basically the interaction between the OS as a user interface, this is always where the problem has occured.

IF meego is to be used as an OS then ALL and every driver must be in place within the structure of its BIOS and this is what has never been accomplished.

What has happened is the development has been limited because of driver source and as a UI it is clashing with instead of working with the OS.

IF meego as an OS is to even work then ALL source must be available and here we start with the problem of development for the N900 because for me i still do not understand what the adaption was, ie an OS or a UI/GUI.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Device hacker is anyone with a sane amount of knowledge on how a typical OS works and wants to put it on a device. N9/N950 users will have the MOSLO in due time, we had some bureaucracy due to this.

Hardware adaptation is things like: configuration files for hardware, kernel, GLESv2/EGL libraries, modem drivers, etc.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Yes it seems you never really understood what it was, and still ranted so much about it.
In my understanding, MeeGo was a common core:
- entirely open source (like, 100%).
- with reference UI for the targetted platforms. These were never meant to be consumer UI. Just an example of what can be done, and a base framework to test your app in for developpers.

Then, the MeeGo Hardware Adaptation project was adding the Nxxx specific drivers and tuning for having the core booting and running correctly on these devices, without care for the UI.

Finally, the MeeGo CE project (different project but same people) was adding a UI on the Hardware Adaptation project, and bundling some application with the goal of making it "daily use ready". This was at first based on the reference handset UI, but there was discussions at some point to use the tablet UI, and they could have used/devellopped a completely different one in the future.

And after that, there was the abill_uk project, complaining that MeeGo (from netbook to IVI) was failling because the MeeGo CE project was not progressing rapidly enough for him.

In order to stop logicless people from ranting, the Mer project is now without reference UI ;)

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

I still do not get an answer to my question so i will ask again.

What is this meego to be? is it to be an OS or a UI/GUI ?

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

As stated many times, in many places:

Mer:
Mer Hardware:
UI (not Mer):

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

I'm not sure how much clearer I can make this, but here goes.

Mer is a core. An OS that boots to a display with nothing on it (as I said). No UI, no GUI. You are not expected to run this, it's only of interest to people making devices, or people making UIs.

To get something that you can actually run, put another project, such as Cordia, handset CE, or Plasma Active on top. *They* have a UI.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Riddle me this though: for a device hacker who already has a Linux "hardware adaptation" for $mysterious_device to place at the bottom and a decent UI to throw on top, what makes Mer the best choice for the bits inbetween instead of some other distribution like say Debian or OpenEmbedded?

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

Not much of this actually makes sense to me because it seems all self inflicting.

Meego is common core you say but what "core" was it? was it a UI/GUI or was it an OS?.

If it is supposed to be an OS then it must have all source available for the device this OS is to be written for OR are you saying it will be a "common" OS?.

My god you got some work to do if you are to make this a common OS because you then have to incorporate every single driver for every single CPU and component within any device that has been manufactured, the same as Windows is capable of being programmed into any computer as it has all the needed drivers incorperated within its entirety as a multi OS for any device/computer.

"Then, the MeeGo Hardware Adaptation project was adding the Nxxx specific drivers and tuning for having the core booting and running correctly on these devices, without care for the UI."

This is non logical because without care of the UI it cannot be accomplished and this kind of dumfounds me.

"Finally, the MeeGo CE project (different project but same people) was adding a UI on the Hardware Adaptation project, and bundling some application with the goal of making it "daily use ready". This was at first based on the reference handset UI, but there was discussions at some point to use the tablet UI, and they could have used/devellopped a completely different one in the future."

What is the "hardware adaption project" ? is it OS or UI/GUI ?.

What i am trying to esablish here is knowledge of the actual understanding of the meego "build" and just what is it actually meant to be.

Re: MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo
 

But but how on earth can an OS be designed around CLOSED components???.

Do you really think that manufacturers will give you all source code to the devices they have put in there particular design? because without this there can not be an OS of any kind.

Or are you going to start from scratch with data sheets of every component?.