No Terminal, email client or third party apps in MeeGo 1.1?

In a surprising turn of events, the next major release of MeeGo (1.1, which is due this month), may not ship with an email client (due to quality issues in it); a terminal to access the underlying OS or the ability to run any third party Qt applications. A number of bug reports in these critical pieces of software, and a bug in a common part of the UI, have been commented that they are "not targetted for 1.1". Carsten Munk, a member of the MeeGo ARM adaptation team, says on bug #7881, regarding the ability to run plain Qt apps: It's worth bearing in mind that this is MeeGo 1.1, which should not be confused with Nokia's "MeeGo 1.0 N", aka Harmattan, aka Maemo 6. This is also due in the final quarter of this year (although with a much less firm release date), but apparently does not suffer from this bug and, almost certainly(!), will ship with an email client and support for third party applications.


Sign-up for "Early Bird" events in Dublin the weekend before the MeeGo Conference

The MeeGo Conference is going to be held during from Monday to Wednesday in November. To facilitate attendance and enjoyment of the gathering by community members unable to attend the conference during the week, Attila Csipa , Dave Neary and others have started work organizing an "Early Bird" event for the weekend before the conference.


In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • No Terminal, email client or third party apps in MeeGo 1.1?
   • Sign-up for "Early Bird" events in Dublin the weekend before the MeeGo Conference
2. Applications
   • Nokia Panorama for creating wide-angle photos
   • FaceBrick working again
   • Experimental portrait support in N900 email client
   • Experimental portrait support in Control Panel
3. Development
   • Help verify Qt development example bug
   • Empty Frequencies Finder for use with N900 FM transmitter
   • Creating battery-friendly Qt apps
4. Community
   • Bugzilla 3.4 needs your help testing
5. Devices
   • USB hostmode on N900 pre-alpha for willing guinea pigs
   • MeeGo N900 images move to repo.meego.com; latest version includes modem code
   • MeeGo on an HTC Desire
6. Announcements
   • Todoy - sketched alarm & schedule app
   • DigiClock widget for Maemo 5
   • Situare allows location sharing and friend-finding through Facebook
   • Nokia's "Here and Now" service on N900

Frankly, it's a marketing disaster waiting to happen

I AGREE! O_o

Oh. Wow. If it's true...

*facepalm*

lol, cutting off something essential to meet the deadline doesn't sound right at all. Why not just delay Meego 1.1....

As I'm referenced in the post, let me re-iterate what is happening:

1) MeeGo 1.1 (as released in October) is a platform. It has pretty good N900 support but not enough for end-users. I know the marketing has been rather personality split over if it's an end-user platform that's on MeeGo.com or not. What people will use is Nokia MeeGo, SuSE MeeGo and so on, which contains all the goodies (mp3 codecs, flash player, whatever..). Or even 'maemo.org MeeGo for N900'
2) MeeGo 1.1 will be getting bug fixes beyond 1.1 based on it's feature set at release (Ubuntu has a similar approach)
3) MeeGo is on a fixed release schedule, which means that at feature freeze, that's the features that get released. No delays, scrub as many bugs out as possible, push it out. This is a very useful property of a platform that people want to base things on. Fixed release schedules can be seen with Ubuntu, too, for instance.
4) Nothing stops anyone (non-commercial) from taking MeeGo 1.1 for N900 and basing on top of it and delivering something that's end-user able and make it suitable for N900 users' use cases
5) MeeGo 1.2 will continue development for MeeGo on N900 and most things will be directly backportable to MeeGo 1.1 based systems.

What is the technical problem here:
1) E-mail client is simply too buggy. It's open source, published and it is worse to add a buggy client to a platform than not have any at all. If you'd like, you can install the e-mail client still or even modify it.
2) There's a bug in the compositor for Handset UX that causes non-MeeGo Touch applications to show up as a white screen. The reference to 'no 3rd party apps' should be interpreted as 'non-meego API apps'.

The person deciding it wasn't a blocker didn't see the full picture (as in, anything Qt didn't work) and hence the new bug to make sure we get this fixed for 1.1 release.

This is mainly a technical discussion and is being escalated to the right people.

3) xterm not being included is same reasoning, it's there, it's not going away, except the bug above harms xterm too. You can install xterm if you'd like too. Or build your own image with xterm for N900. Or SSH in over USB (which would stay)

Thanks for clearing that up Stskeeps, I must say such a title is sheer sensational journalism at its best :P Also good to hear we will be seeing Ubuntu -esque updates, with bug fixes in between. Will certainly make life easier for those stuck with simple to fix, but debilitating bugs.

Well, with sensationalism, hopefully we'll get the eyes of the appropriate people on the bugs which fundamentally break Nokia's write once, #ifdef everywhere (;-)) Qt story.

Anyway, as I try to clarify, this just highlights that MeeGo 1.1 isn't a consumer, or power user (or possibly even app developer) release. It may be the basis for backporting some stuff from 1.2 and forward porting stuff from Harmattan to get some kind of power-user ready hybrid. Or it might be the Windows 3.0 of MeeGo.

Can you imagine MeeGo trying to pitch itself to developers and partners if the mdecorator bug isn't fixed and there's no xterm nor any out-of-the-box running of plain Qt apps?!

The platform needs to get a running start and MeeGo and Harmattan (especially if it's called "MeeGo 1.0 N") are going to be conflated in the minds of the public, the tech press and bloggers. A story of "no plain Qt apps on MeeGo" will seriously hinder Nokia's marketing message and strategic development direction. It has to get fixed before that meme takes hold.

waiting for next version.