this week i'm due to take delivery of an atom-based netbook, & needless to say the first thing i hope to do is put meego on it.

the question is, what's the software situation ?

i got the impression from Elsewhere that meego is actually a radical departure from maemo; will i be able to install maemo 5 software on the device ? looking at meego.com/garage there isn't any meego-specific software out yet, so if maemo 5 software won't run, will i basically be using a meego-powered laptop as a testing platform (which is not necessarily a bad thing from my point of view) rather than being able to *use* it ?

MeeGo on netbook has not much in common with Maemo. So you cannot (or at least not easily) install Maemo software on the netbook.
The situation should be simpler with Qt-based Maemo software. x86 versions of the software from maemo-extras can be downloaded, but since the package format is different on MeeGo, you'd have to extract stuff by hand, and hunt down the dependencies by hand, too.
It's easier to get native Linux software running on a MeeGo netbook.

thanks for the answer - do you know if meego for netbooks yet has any kind of repository like the ubuntu repository, or would it basically be a case of experimentation ?

(i see http://forum.meego.com/forumdisplay.php?f=6 may well be the better place for asking these questions - apologies)