MeeGo & Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit write-up

The ever-excellent LWN covers the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was held in San Francisco just over a week ago. In addition to a MeeGo workshop, the Maemo community was represented by Ryan Abel and Randall Arnold. Jake Edge describes how both Ari Jaaksi (Nokia) and Imad Sousou (Intel) gave keynotes: Numerous times during the keynotes, these senior figures described the development as happening in the open. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. There's an open Bugzilla, an open IRC channel and a code dump which has been "thrown over the wall". Real open development would have architectural discussions about the integration of various components happening on the meego-dev mailing list; it'd have the building of the first release (whether for the N900 or netbooks) happening in the open, with nightly integration builds; it'd have build plans on OBS open and available for others to inspect.

This has been noticed by the community and was raised during Wednesday's Technical Steering Group (TSG) meeting - on which Imad sits. The minutes are linked to later in this issue, but an underlying tone of "you can't expect things to change overnight" will remind many in the Maemo community, at least, of a familiar refrain from Nokia during the earlier days of Maemo. Valtteri Halla, the other member of the TSG, has encouraged everyone in the community to continue pushing for more openness.


MWKN needs more contributors - please get involved

Hopefully, if you're reading this, you find the weekly issues of MWKN of some value. The original intent of the digest was that by crowdsourcing content from throughout the Maemo (and now MeeGo) sphere, the responsibility of finding all relevant content wouldn't fall on the shoulders of a few individuals. However, we have a problem, in that there are only a very limited number of people who are regularly contributing to MWKN; with over two thirds of the articles being found by your editor. The contributors we have are very valued, and their contributions - whether highly numerous; of high quality; or both - are much appreciated.

Contributing is easy: send a URL via Twitter with some keywords and the job of fleshing it out falls on the sub-editors and editors. MWKN is becoming unsustainable with the other roles that Andrew Flegg and Ryan Abel are doing - finding the content as well as editing it was not the intention, and is taking up too much time.

If you'd like to see MWKN continue, please consider contributing the tidbits of news that you come across. If you'd like to contribute, but would prefer to have some form of incentive, please let us know on the forum thread below (or via any other mechanism you prefer).



In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • MeeGo & Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit write-up
   • MWKN needs more contributors - please get involved
2. Applications
   • Handwriting recognition with CellWriter
   • Heroes of Might and Magic II on Maemo
   • Telescope is Maemo 5-style task switcher for N8x0
   • ...and 3 more
3. Development
   • Speeding up Python applications
   • Qt's experimental versions and Maemo packages
   • MeeGo Repository "Working Group" next steps
   • Using ccache 3.0 to speed up package building in Scratchbox
   • "Every time you scale a pixmap, God kills a kitten"
4. Community
   • WOMWorld-organised meetups in Toronto & Vancouver postponed (now in May)
   • Meeting minutes for MeeGo TSG meeting, following up from Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit
   • MeeGo Bugzilla moving to bugs.meego.com
5. Devices
   • Status of MeeGo N900 port
   • N900 to launch in Hong Kong
   • How To tighten up the N900 slider
6. Maemo in the Wild
   • Using N900 on the road for business
   • MeeGo workgroup at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit