since "the project" focuses on Debianizing Maemo5 for now,
I suggest to start with garage.maemo.org and move to another host when we can start with MeeGo.
We should really decide on the name very soon so that we don't have to refer to it as "the project"
Are you fine with "Moebian" (I don't want it badly, I just could find something better)?
or do you have any other suggestions?

feel free to post your comments here for now.

BTW, I'm just chatting with stskeeps and he offered to give us some advice.
He also suggested we should use Mer as basis.
I think should arrange a joint IRC meeting. How about Tuesday at 21 GMT?

I agree that an IRC meeting will be a good thing, but please not Tuesday 21 GMT. Wednesday is much better for me. Also 20 GMT is better than 21 (I am at GMT+3, and next day will be a workday).

As for basing on Mer...

I suggest to declare two principles:
- we are going to keep n900 working and full-functional; if some tech decision leads to limiting phone n900 functionality compared to original, than it is a bad decision and we should avoid it;
- we are going to match debian packaging quality - never allow packages to install to /home/user, never allow packages to touch files owned by other packages, follow debian policy whenever possible, etc

As long as we can keep with these pronciples, we may use things from Mer.

stskeeps told me that the project Maemo:Merevel:2.0:Test2 (requires account)
https://build.opensuse.org/project/s...%3A2.0%3ATest2
is similar: it's a rebuild of all Maemo free packages with replacements for the closed dependencies build on top of lenny. We should investigate how much we can use existing work from Mer^2

This Wed+Thu after 18 GMT is not possible for me. We could meet sometime before 18 GMT (depending on stskeeps...) or on Friday.

exactly! The project should be an enhancement and a bug fix but not a start from scratch project. We should use as much existing work as possible. That's one of the reasons for using Debian, anyway.

Before 18:00 GMT (= before 15:00 MSK) on workday is impossible for me, sorry. Let's try Friday evening then.

Isn't that 21 MSK?

Hmm. Yes it is. Perhaps it's too late so I'm starting to be dumb.

But anyway even 21:00 is hard for me. I have a window between 22 and 24 when I'm more or less available, other time is problematic.

let's stick to this forum or email then. stskeeps is busy on Friday.

The project is now registered at https://garage.maemo.org/projects/moebian/
please add yourself.

Hi titan and yoush,
I thought I should take a second here and chime in. Seeing as you registered here in October and December and don't seem to be big IRC users, you might not have caught the early days of the mer project and where it evolved from. Back in January 2008 or so I was trying to bring some debian packages to the Maemo 4 (I don't even remember which ones) and got totally fed up with scratchbox and ancient package versions. So I decided I should just take advantage of the bootmenu utility and load a basic Debian root off of the SD card. After a couple weeks worth of evenings I had Debian booting into X11. Almost none of the N800's hardware worked. No wifi, no sound, no battery measurement. So I figured the next logical thing to do was bring hildon up inside Debian. I found out that the pkg-maemo guys had already made a good start, but to make a long story short, their version of hildon wasn't exactly the same as the Nokia-supplied Maemo 4 hildon.

It turns out that to make hildon work the way it does, Nokia actually patches gtk+ and glib, and their patches don't apply to (and in some cases conflict with) later version of gtk+, specifically the version that was used in the then-current Debian release. So i hit an impasse: Basically I could have hildon apps installed or debian gtk+ apps but not both. That was pretty much the first roadblock, but really it was just the first of many. Nokia has patched *a lot* of the free apps and libs they use to improve power management or to support their hildon stack in some way. At the very least you have some massive amounts of repackaging and recompiling ahead of you. And keep in mind that as you work on your "fork" of Maemo 5, Nokia will be working on theirs, quietly diverging from where you are.

So, that was debian for N8x0 and deblet. After that Stskeeps and I decided to try and walk the middle road as best we could, using an ubuntu structure, and repackaging Maemo source packages as necessary to work in Ubuntu. it meant we'd be going the Maemo route and would make us (at least at first) unable to use any GNOME apps. It actually worked out pretty well for a while, but it's an absolutely huge undertaking, and you won't find a lot of people with the combination of the knowledge, time and energy to help. I know that I got burned out from it a couple months ago.

So, I'll close by wishing you the best of luck, and offering to try and answer questions you have (I'll subscribe to this thread, so please don't PM me) so you don't end up sinking as much time as I did into making mistakes and walking down dead-ends. For myself, I think I'm going to try and get involved in Meego.

-John