Thanks for all the good work on Mer.

I noticed this quoted statement and also that the goals for Mer were recently changed in the Wiki, and also the FAQ stating that it would be necessary to dual boot with Diablo to run Diablo apps.

Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding, Mer does not and will not contain Diablo APIs - correct?

If so, this is disappointing as I was hoping that it would be possible to use Mer to run a Diablo app on a device other than a NIT

edit: who or what is "maemian"?

Can we have a rule that people aren't so demanding about making an OS that is still in alpha/beta work right?

Jeez.

EDIT: I believe a maemian would be a person / creature that hails from the world of maemo (ie NIT users).

Ah, that was me trying to make it clearer. How's this:

* Does it run inside Diablo?
No. Mer runs instead of Diablo - but don't panic, you can dual boot from one to the other; so if Mer isn't good enough just yet you can switch back to Diablo. Eventually we hope you won't need Diablo at all


Mer does contain maemo APIs and many (most?) Diablo apps should run on Mer.

But not always "out of the box" as it were.

You can.... http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Status

It validates packages to make sure they build cleanly on Mer too IIRC.

We are working to get garage to submit applications to the Mer autobuilder (OBS) at the same time as they go to the Fremantle and Diablo builders.

Re: goals, we just cleaned them up a bit - re Diablo: Right, I can't find that FAQ - and the one I found doesn't say that.

Well. Keep in mind that most Fremantle APIs are backwards compatible to Diablo. So most stuff works, or with little change. The only Diablo API Mer really contains is the old hildon desktop (which we may get rid of).

We actually never had Diablo GTK, Hildon, etc. - they were all Fremantle even before the alpha releases.

In most cases you'll be able to run the app on Mer - but honestly, developers should work on porting their applications to Fremantle APIs. Do you have any particular applications in mind?

Diablo API is a dead end. Unless of course you want to be hired by Marvell who's reference design of a MP4 player is MediaBox on top of a Diablo SDK that has been made to actually run..

Maemian is a script like linitian that checks if a debian (source) package is correct and sane. One of the ideas of Fremantle extras (do note i mean extras, not -testing, -devel), correct me if I'm wrong - packages will have to pass a number of tests including maemian tests to be included in the main extras repository.

The hope is that we can through that process incite developers to have cleaner and more portable packages (read: will build on Mer, Fremantle, even within OpenEmbedded without problems).

Just for reference:

http://lintian.debian.org/

Maemian is the Maemoesque version of Lintian.

Tim

Any chance that Mer will have mouse support for the NIT?

Well, currently we just hide the cursor. Should be fairly easy to enable it again. Except if Xomap screws it up?

If someone really needs the mouse support but Xomap won't allow it, there's also Xorg

Ever bought a piece of hardware and the software got EOLed? A Nokia phone perhaps? The Nokia Internet Tablets (Nokia 770, Nokia N800, Nokia N810, Nokia N810WME) are now legacy devices.

Because Maemo is open source there is a independent project based on Maemo, called Mer. This project aims to be more hardware agnostic (including support for mentioned Nokia Internet Tablets). It provides an up2date OS where Maemo is officially EOL by Nokia, but it is currently in heavy development therefore not production quality; it is aimed for developers and curious users.

So, where other Nokia products (S40 phones and S60 smartphones) become EOL and you're SOL you now have a choice to install a 3rd party firmware.

Right, my donated 770 just WSOD'ed itself. Turns out turning it on while USB is connected is a bad idea. So there won't be more development from me personally in that direction.

But, it did so while I was trying to make a screenshot of 0.15testing9 running on 770 for you peeps. BBB-770 did a kernel package, I fixed some things in our scripts and we need people to test it.

Anyone want to try http://stskeeps.subnetmask.net/mer/0...esting9.tar.gz for me (and Mer) on a 770 so we can give you a Mer 0.15 for 770?

Instructions here still apply.