So, I have just uploaded a VMDK of what i call snapshot 40 of Mer^2.

What is Mer^2?

To put it in simple terms:

* It's what will turn into the Fremantle backport on N8x0
* It's Mer without the idealism and with realistic short-term expectations.
* It's to put it simply, Fremantle base system and some UI packages put on top of Debian 5.0. Packages are built using some OBS tricks. It is closer to Fremantle than Debian and many Debian packages may break on it.
* It does not yet have a proper non-GL desktop for N8x0. What is planned is to whip the old desktop into feeling a little like Fremantle desktop. I will need some volunteer GTK+ coders for this.

This snapshot is only for hardcore tinkers and is currently for X86 only for development purposes. Only usable in VirtualBox.

You can download the snapshot at http://stskeeps.subnetmask.net/mer2/mer2-40.vmdk.zip and you will need to follow http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Documentat..._in_VirtualBox (steps 1-4). If it complains about root not found, switch to IDE, not SATA disk in the virtual machine.

What it provides? Well, Fremantle base system and X-Terminal on top. Now, with some imagination, imagine what happens when you add nokia-binaries repositories and the SDK repositories and try to install? Or extras-devel for Fremantle for X86?

See what you can make work, what you can't, report the bugs/missing packages/incompatibilites/etc.

There's a X-Terminal, dhclient, vim, apt-get. Root pasword is 'rootme' - use 'su'. Have fun with it and let's see what we can do with this base.

stskeeps if you need anything theme wise just let me know.

Already got maemo-org hidden in there, though not visible yet.

Aren't those compiled for armv7, while the n8x0 has an armv6?

It's x86 only for this iteration it seems, and those would be the repositories that are typically used for the scratchbox environment. I'm new to maemo, and I've been wondering, are there x86 binaries for every app in the repositories? Where is the source code to packages in the repositories?

I tinkered with prior versions of Mer, and the prospect of installing from Ubuntu repositories was quite tantalising to me. But, just as with Qole's Easy Debian, you run into practical issues. Programs don't use the hardware Fullscreen button (many of them want F11, which the NITs don't have). Many programs require OpenGL or a certain screen resolution that the NIT doesn't have and thus fail to run. This is all before you even get to the Fremantle software divergences. So, as a practical matter, the repositories would take some filtering at a minimum to make them friendly. And possibly even light porting would be necessary.

So, Debian compatibility doesn't seem to be as nice as I naively thought it would be, and thus I'm less sorry to see it fall off the list of short-term goals.

The idea is to provide an environment where it would be possible to recompile Fremantle bits to ARMv6+VFP. Right now, x86 is useful for getting system up and running.

Yes, I understand that, but you mentioned the nokia-binary repository, so I thought those programs couldn't be recompiled due to the missing sources.

I think the hope is that Nokia would recompile these binaries from their own closed sources.

I think that nokia hopes that our devices die of "natural" death before having to do anything.