As you know, the tablets and the software that powers them are commercial products for the market. The teams involved are in the same league than the ones shipping the Nokia products many people know. We have to deliver products to the market in certain deadlines, we have to execute business programs with results and we can't fail.

What perhaps some of you don't know is that Nokia does plenty of research about zillion topics, some of them involving open source. Research means that you try things out, even different approaches to similar goals, either to learn, as step stones towards higher goals, for productization... or all together. This is the context of this Mojo project. They got something useful and this is why you know now about it.

Why is the Mojo project useful? Some reasons come to mind. Before nobody knew for certain what would take to port Ubuntu to ARM, and now everybody interested knows, and can help improving the match. Bridging maemo and Ubuntu (Mobile or not) was more complicated before than now, opening more possibilities for the future.

As a collateral benefit, I would (personally) add that the Mojo project is also useful to remind free software fellows that Nokia has the capacity to surprise with the unexpected. It did it in the past, has done it now and will do it in the future. B)

Does it mean that maemo will be based in the future on Debian or Ubuntu? No, or not necessarely, but at least now we can think more specifically about possibilities like these - and this is why reseach is useful to business programs.

Additional comment to those having nice adjectives for maemo and thinking that just using Debian or Ubuntu as baseline would be simple and enough:

Compiling source code is just one variable in a rather complex equation. You can complain about the OS in the tablets not being directly based on A or B but there are reasons why it is what it is. Think of A or B back in the years when the 770 and its software were developed, the rythm of development and devices released since then, the innovation introduced by maemo inexistent in A or B by the time the new releases were made... Now try to do all this while pairing processes with the community, the maintainers and the governance model of A or B. Sure it's doable (less sure accomplishing fixed deadlines, though) but we have to choose our battles, and I'd say until now the strategies chosen have been good enough to be where we are in Linux + open source + mobile.

This is no excuse not to improve the current product, though. Agreed.

Are there images of Ubuntu available for download somewhere? I only found the mojo repos.

Thanks.

Two questions...

1) Where's the debian.tar.bz2 that you used? I assume it has as much support as is possible for the tablet (network card, bluetooth, etc) outside of Maemo (I noticed you had a bluetooth icon on your screen)... Also, how big a partition is needed for that? 2GB? 3?

2) Does pressure sensitivity work in GIMP? That interests me, and I can't test it in my VNC config, because of course pressure values are not sent via VNC.

The Debian.tar.bz2 is linked on the wiki article I wrote:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/wi...p?title=Debian
A little under 1GB with Gimp and xfce installed in addition to all the maemo stuff I have.

I dunno, I'll have to fire up my Miata and tow the trailer back out to see. :P I'll test it later and tell you.

vnc is open source, shouldn't be too hard to modify it to send pressure information too, after all, it's only software, right?

Just ribbing you about the trailer-Miata thing.

I love trying out new and crazy stuff, that's why I'm configuring my N800 at the moment to quadruple-boot (Debian and KDE are going to be two of the boot options, if someone gets a workable Ubuntu image, I'll get that one going, too), so I can try cutting-edge stuff as it becomes available...

I just think it's silly to say something runs well when your average iPhone user would stare blankly at it and scratch his head in bewilderment.

This is why context is important. The sentence you keep quoting was said by a research engineer in the Embedded Linux Conference to an audience made mostly by Linux mobile/embedded engineers, and has been kind of seconded in this thread between tablet enthusiasts. But this is also why you haven't heard any product manager mentioning i.e. GIMP in the tablets in any consumer electronics show.

Different audiences, different expectations, many beautiful colors between black and white.

The problem is that statements meant to be addressed to hackers and developers are picked up by the media and splashed as headlines or pullouts or sound bites with little or no context. The message gets mangled and munged and people with very different expectations than the developers to whom the statements were addressed end up saying, "wow, did you hear that x runs well on y?"

I guess if Johnx had announced here on ITT that he had gotten Gimp set up to run nicely in XFce on the tablet, by booting to a Debian partition on his SD card, and putting the menus on one virtual desktop and the picture on another, and he had included the screen shots he provided, I would have had a very different reaction. People post such things here all the time, and they are exciting and cool, and inexperienced people read the announcement and say, "Ooh. Dual boot to a Debian partiition, that sounds like a lot of work, but maybe someday we can all have Gimp," and that's the end of that.

But Ubuntu is the face of "friendly Linux," and people with very little computer knowledge have successfully installed Ubuntu on their home computers. And it was said by "the engineering fellow at Nokia" which adds another level of authority and expectations.

And it was in that context that I began to complain about the phrase, "runs well," and, at this point, I am quite willing to let the whole thing drop and simply agree that yes, the GIMP runs well on the tablet... if you're a hacker-type or "tablet enthusiast".

Just don't buy a tablet so that you can run Ubuntu or GIMP or Microsoft Word, you might be a bit disappointed.

Then blame the media, not the source. However, Linuxdevices.com has not exactly the audience of PC Magazine, and the whole article is geeky enough to refrain an average end user from doing anything: "(...) can be tested in QEMU (...) Or, it can be run in a chrooted environment from an SD flash memory card".

The Mojo project is clear about its objectives: "Our objective is make available complete, standard desktop distributions for mobile and embedded devices." This is why you get a standard GIMP that "works well". Your complaints are mostly about UI and I fully agree with them: this is why nobody is thinking about productizing standard GIMP for tablet users. At least now we know the engine works reasonably in terms of performance (before Mojo many experienced hackers thought it would probably be too much for the constrained resources of a tablets. I guess this is why the Nokia fellow picked it as example in his presentation.

Now the "works well" is useful data for someone thinking about adapting the GIMP UI for the tablets. And that's it, relax and enjoy.

I shall!

Sorry everyone; if you ever read one of my posts and it seems like I'm trolling or flame-baiting, then I've done a bad job of expressing myself. I'm not interested in pontificating from a pedestal, I only like a good lively discussion.