I don't know where you got the understanding that "it has now moved on to other devices", could you elaborate a bit on that?

I'm only talking about N900 in my posts, for what it's worth.

When you look at the ui it is very basic and incomplete, slow and does not have the ability and functionality even as Maemo does.

Development has been going on for how long now?.

I do not see anthing in a complete state yet as it is only still in dvelopment and a specific development "os" if you can even call it that as it is incomplete in many ways.

How many people are currently working on this Meego adaption for the N900 now?.

OK, since I presented the layering (Core, hardware adaptation, UI) to you in a earlier post, I'll just tell the exact story of how things have been working so you can put that in perspective. I won't excuse the UI quality, but I just want to make sure you're understanding this clearly to understand where we are coming from and where we are.

Almost since the start of the MeeGo project, there has been a team that has worked specifically towards the N900, called the MeeGo ARM team. This has been a paid team to do so, paid by Nokia

That team has been doing two things:
* Making MeeGo work on ARM processors and maintaining the ARM port (boring stuff like fixing compile errors, compilers, etc)
* Making a hardware adaptation for N900
- this means in practice, making modern kernels for the N900, get new graphics drivers, implement phonecalls on top of a open stack, implement GPS support and so on. This team has not touched UI at all.

There has been another team, that made a reference Handset UI for all MeeGo devices (UI is independent) based on the technologies from what you now see as Harmattan, MeeGo Touch Framework (previously known as libdui, or Developing under the Influence). This team has been paid by Intel. When I say reference, this UI is of course very limited and not commercial grade, more like a "can show at tradeshows and someone can possibly make a product out of". N900 team used this reference UI on top of the N900 hardware adaptation and the ARM port to test out hardware adaptation features, which is what many of you have seen.

Now, sometime in December or earlier, Intel stopped this work, leaving it in the crap state it was and didn't bother to tell anyone they stopped working on it. This was because they moved all their resources to the Tablet UI work, which was secret at the time.

Now, February 11 happened and well, that changed circumstances. The MeeGo efforts from Nokia's side expanded (both in team size and focus) into providing the Community Edition. The hardware adaptation team continued it's work as usual. The work was decided to be based on the Handset UI work as this was closest to the Harmattan software stack.

Teams were put together with a goal of providing basic functionality in the UI and polishing the UI, listed in http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900#Key_features key features.

Over those months since there has been several releases, immensely improving experience and performance, as many will tell you.

The N900 hardware adaptation itself is pretty much complete, hence they're now working on making it sustainable for the future.

There are some problems still occuring, which impacts people's first impression, such as the media indexer, Tracker, runs on first boot, rendering the device immensely slow until it has settled. Similar things happen on N900/Maemo.

There are problems with application launch times, though they are much more improved than originally. On Maemo you see smoke and mirrors because many applications are already started in the background and hence 'launch quicker', or a splash screen. CE don't have such magic tricks at the moment.

This is a list of people who has contributed to the community edition.

http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/Contributors

This is an important point that everyone needs to understand: Think of the paid team people as community members working day in and day out to improve the product. Then think about how much difficulty other UX, hardware adaptation teams will have if we have been so many, working like open source projects do, completely in the open and still only got this far?

Look up the names of some of those people on google - they aren't all amateurs and many have been working with making Maemo/N900 as you see it today in various areas. Or the N950/N9.

What is happening right now is that the CE project is looking to put together a steering group for the future, as we are directly offering this as a direction for the Maemo and MeeGo communities to work on and actively making it sustainable. Steering group would contain contributors and community representants, ie, something to actually govern for the community.

And yes, we've only got so far, but with a little polish and perhaps your contribution we can get even better and get to a place where you can accept the quality. We've gotten quite far - better than I've seen other UI projects on other devices. But yes, not nearly there just yet. I personally hope that the rebase upon MeeGo 1.3 and Qt 4.8 will make things a lot faster.

http://blip.tv/carsten-munk/qt-compo...-based-5508447 shows nice promise in that regard.

There is also interesting developments ongoing (like Smoku told about in Cordia thread) about a new openly governed/openly developed fork of MeeGo, which CE work would probably fit in nicely too.

I hope this helps understanding where and how.

@tekki - thanks for the detailed explanation. Now I can see the bright n900 future ahead leaded by the best of the best developers from all over the world united. With Meego CE as primary OS.

But please, can some of you guys throw a little light on what is your exact problem with continuing Maemo development (from not so great developers, just ordinary monkeys like me) until that future happens. Almost every time someone related to Meego CE(team?) opens his mouth, the mantra "you are wasting your time, you stupid" is thrown. Apocalyptic threads like "n900 is dead, Maemo is dead" are opened every now and then from people who moved from Maemo to who knows where(Meego?). Why is that?

Something stinks here, really. I didn't see anyone from HW adaptation team (the guys that are paid by Nokia) to contribute a line of code in the last few months for kernel-power or CSSU for example even though I suspect all of them are still using Maemo as their primary OS(or I am missing something?). And they have lots of closed Maemo bits revealed. Why?

BTW don't talk about NDA's please, I am not sayng that anyone should break NDA, there are ways to make things happens despite of NDA's if someone has a will.

Thanks.

AM sorry to say but it is just not happening, whatever is said about Meego it is just not going anywhere and enough people have been at it now for over 8 months or so and for it to be in the state it is in now is why people are losing interest.

That list of dev's is a "was" situation and not a "now" situation that i asked you about.

Meego is nothing at the moment worth even talking about and that is basically that and all i have to say on the matter.

My (personal) opinion is that it's a waste of time to do any big effort as everyone will be heading towards some time where they'd have to redistribute full images/firmwares or will hit a wall related to the 57% closed source bits in Maemo.

Instead of trying to fix that past, how about getting ahead in the game instead of constantly being behind? My own reasoning is that I've seen a lot of these kind of projects to fix a company's firmware and they've all ended similar ways. And now we have a good chance to finally be ahead in the game in a open source way and have something of our own.

I'm not saying that CSSU is a bad idea, for good measure. CSSU has purposes, but will hit the closed binaries wall eventually as most fixes people want are in, well, the closed software.

Never said N900 is dead In fact, it might be one of the best supported by open software that I've seen.

I can't speak to other people's motivation, but sometimes, when people go home from work they don't work on the same thing they do while working. Or they would rather spend it on the project they're working on because they find it exciting.

We did contribute kexec patches ages ago. uboot stems from the adaptation work. Noone stops anyone from contributing with knowledge.

If you want an exact reason why you're not seeing any activity into Maemo, it's simple, it's because those activities aren't financed by Nokia. This usually means Nokia doesn't see reason to.

They however see good reason in furthering open systems with Qt and not beating a dead horse, it seems like...

However, just to reach out: If there's any technical questions, people are more than welcome to come to #meego-arm IRC channel on irc.freenode.net and ask questions. For many things we can advise.

tekki, if you want to keep your sanity, use the ignore list on that pure excuse for a human being(abill_uk).

Please keep that out of this thread. He brought up a common sentiment and it was worth answering.

One based on FUD, ignorance and wilfull determination to completely ignore the MANY posts by people more knoweldgeable, better informed and closer to the project.

Whilst I admire your sentiment tekki, you're wasting time and oxygen in this case. the ignore button is a much better tool to address the issue.

virtually every thread relating to Meego on this forum is littered with the same comments by Abill_uk and the same ignorant and uninformed rubbish.

when pushed into a corner, he/she/it pulls out the "I'm hardware, not software" routine and then wanders off to what ever thread/post/forum where he/she/it can stir up ire and angst with yet another post full of rubbish and uninformed, unsubstantiated opinion.

Whilst I, and many more actually read your posts with a great respect and regard for your knowledge and the FACTS you bring to the conversation (along with informed and rational views), it's been said before and you really are trying to sow seeds in barren soil with this particular individual.....

edit: thank f#*k the Meego handset forum hasn't been sullied with the same rubbish

I would answer with anyone, just people aren't asking that many questions these days. Would rather spend time on someone else's questions