Yeah--I also hate being told we would have backports and community SSU from Fremantle as answers to FIXED IN FREMANTLE and WONTFIXes, too. So much for unsubstantiated promises and claims of open-source in Maemo. So much for the MeeGo promises too, I suppose.

That doesn't seem very day-to-day for the typical user coming from Maemo/Android/Blackberry/iSplat (i*)/etc. Isn't it still only just kind of, sort of, pre-beta still? It doesn't seem quite settled and baked yet, or did I miss some major milestone?

Agreed. Nokia's blue-headed step-child, the one they never showed loved.

I asked for specifics. I'm not sure what jerryrigging you're talking about. I am not a mind reader and I don't know the nuances of your psychological workings and experiences with the N900 to know which hacks/tweaks/modifications you're considering jerry-rigging - and which of those you actually consider bad. As for the errors, yes, **** happens, some of which Nokia won't fix and some of which they would be able to do something about but don't because either their decision making process sucks, or corporate patent bs regarding software ownership sucks.

But it still says nothing about what you mean about full Linux. I have bugs in Debian. Granted it's in Virtual Box, but it should effect the basics such as whether or not vi works correctly. Does that mean Debian is suddenly not a full Linux system? If I strip the desktop environment, and just set up the linux kernel, with some minimal drivers and the X window system running, does that make it less full?

The Open Maemo Ballpoint Pork.



But TBH it's a good effort by the community with the CSSU, but I thought the idea was to do a better job than Nokia did.
But having said that, that's not possible if all the WONTFIXes are in the closed components.

Rather than making it all open Nokia could enlist a few trusted community members to carry on where they left off with access rights to the closed components. This would give us [the community] what we want, regular updates with all the WONTFIXes fixed while still protecting Nokia's intellectual property.

Of course, but go read up a bit about what the intention is with "DE". It's quite simple. Establish a few basic use cases that "just works", have it be usable by a 'developer' or 'hacker' on a daily basis. And at same time, make it extensible.

Even hackers are turned off if basic functionality doesn't work (power management - I don't want a really hot handset near my crotch, buggy UI). As an example, I wanted to throw out my Neo Freerunner out the window from 9th floor after an hour of use and I'm not usually picky about my UI experiences, having used command line UNIX since I was 8.

If we have that basis in short term, we have something really nice to build on top of for additional features. As well as totally customizable applications. Even QML makes it really easy, provided the hardware adaptation is there for things.

I for one support rewriting NetworkManager. It has existed for, what, half a decade now, and still fails to support many basic use cases that "just worked" out of the box even on Nokia N800. Add to that its heavy memory footprint and you really start to wonder if you want it on a small device...

On the other hand, NetworkManager's habbit of doing just about nothing by itself, and needing distributions to add lots of glue to even give you a config file, it sounds a bit like it'd be at home with MeeGo core's policy of being a base for distributions/integrators ;-)

I think what Cordia and the CSSU guys are doing is still the way forward at the moment. We have the CSSU slowly replacing the closed source components with open QT replacements. As they are QT the interfaces can easily be carried over to Cordia when the functionality required by them is implemented.

I seem to remember reading over the last few weeks something about Nokia wanting to make Meego so that it takes the burden of maintaining/building the OS off Nokia and hand it over to the community. As most of us probably understand, there are certain binary blobs they wish to keep closed source. Drivers and a few libraries specific to each device which would probably be the hardware adaption teams focus. Once the OS is up and running and Cordia is in a position where it is usable for day to day tasks, the only thing Nokia would have to do is update the small binary blobs here and there. Much better for them.

One thing I did wonder is how much work would be involved to remove GTK from Fremantle. If Meego and what remains of Symbian is going to go over to supporting QT, the CSSU are reimplementing applets in QT and Cordia is QT?, what is the point of loading a GTK desktop to run QT apps? Could we not replace hildon-desktop and friends and implement Cordia's UI?

Stskeeps: So is having open applications in contrast to some of the Maemo 5 ones? Because the situation as I see it, for Maemo 5, is that I think there is another interest of hackers to want to customise things like the Calendar, but there isn't the source code. So open applications, and not merely the backend, will be a good thing in the MeeGo DE. I'm quite happy with the situation as announced so far, it's certainly an improvement of the doom and gloom I was feeling a while back.

The thing I'm missing the most is that no standard way of making phone calls exists on linux.
We have interfaces for LEDs, NICs, usb pointing devices and all sorts of weird hardware. But making a phonecall is still a serial port with AT commands? and what about muxing gprs? 3G?
Everybody keeps re-inventing the wheel for "their" GUI.
We all need to agree on a lowest common denominator, some kind of dial-up daemon that can do muxing, set up and automatically knows what to do with incoming calls.

I know it can be done with loads and loads of scripts, but we need to agree upon something simpler; single executable, with simple config, something like dnsmasq for dhcp+dns.
It could have a simple shell program that initiates phonecalls.
All GUIs should use the shell program to make calls, and not talk to the daemon direct.
An incoming phonecall or phone status could be a fifo, /proc or /sys file, what ever is the most appropriate.
The config should already explain all sound routing.

This would be a good first step to making all ordinary linux distros part of the phone linux landscape, and therefor paving the way to having access to a proper phone distro.
Gentoo, Debian, OpenWRT etc.
We don't really need a special phone distro if all the programs needed, already exist in ordinary distros.

You mean like FSO or ofono ?

Those are fully open-sourced and GPL, right?