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In case anyone was wondering where Tizen came from.

Meamo (Nokia) + Moblin (Intel) = Meego - Nokia + Samsung = Tizen

They had the dominant smartphone OS AND the dominant dumbphone OS. They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare. They had the best development tools, which would allow one to target those 3 OSs simultaneously. And they were developing this new Linux-based dumbphone OS that would be created around those tools.

Now they have Windows Phone.

Amazing to think that was little more than a year ago.

This is re-writing history. One year ago Nokia was loosing scaringly fast on all fronts, to iPhone and Android, and this was why Kallasvuo had to step down as CEO. The last 3 years before Elop's appointment Nokia lost 70% of it's market value (!) due to this trend.This is their 5-year stock trend.

They had the dominant smartphone OS AND the dominant dumbphone OS. They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare. They had the best development tools, which would allow one to target those 3 OSs simultaneously. And they were developing this new Linux-based dumbphone OS that would be created around those tools.

Now they have Windows Phone.

Amazing to think that was little more than a year ago.

They had the dominant smartphone OS AND the dominant dumbphone OS. They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare. They had the best development tools, which would allow one to target those 3 OSs simultaneously. And they were developing this new Linux-based dumbphone OS that would be created around those tools.

Now they have Windows Phone.

Really, REALLY, REALLY makes you wonder what kind of deal Microsoft has with Elop personally, doesn't it?

They had the dominant smartphone OS AND the dominant dumbphone OS. They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare. They had the best development tools, which would allow one to target those 3 OSs simultaneously. And they were developing this new Linux-based dumbphone OS that would be created around those tools.

Now they have Windows Phone.

My guess you are looking for a pad and not a full tablet!

A Levono Thinkpad x201 is the best tablet (how ironic it has pad in the name) I used with Linux so far. Everything on this think just works (though I never tried the analog modem).
-gps
-gsm
-touchscreen/pen
-fingerprint reader
-tilt sensors
-all the special buttons
-wireless

So if you want a pad instead, take a look at the Meego "supported" devices:
http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/TEGRA2

Beware of the Advent Vega pads, it's a nice platform but the screen is absolute shit. But maybe a poor viewing angle doesn't affect you that much.

OTOH, Did you ever think it was possible that you could answer 'yes' to the question 'Does that car run Linux?'.

That was one of the goals with meego

\

This month, I have a direct-from-Nokia N9, running Maemo 6/"MeeGo Harmattan" (not to be confused with mainstream MeeGo), with a nice security framework forbidding such dangerous actions as chroot to the user, and rendering huge chunks of system configuration non-modifiable. The promised "open mode", where you would own your own device, but not be able to access DRMed apps and media, never materialised,

The open mode is implemented, and apparently as of the beta2 for N950 the intended mechanism works. Users with N9's on PR1.0 are reporting that they can boot a minimally patched kernel into open mode.

Aegis is hindering my device usage in the name of protecting exactly fuck-all.

Just the same sort of crap as a typical Android phone, and just as open to abuse

Really? You mean preventing user apps from doing dangerous things without the user's knowledge is just as open to abuse as allowing everything?

Too many ambitious but clueless users on N900 have had to have their hands held through manually fixing or flashing their devices because they thought installing rootsh was cool. If it had been a mainstream device, I think there would have been a lot of exploits for it ...

Since the N9 was intended (until Feb 12) to be a mainstream device, it really wouldn't have been a good idea to have gone with the totally open mode of N900.

\

This month, I have a direct-from-Nokia N9, running Maemo 6/"MeeGo Harmattan" (not to be confused with mainstream MeeGo), with a nice security framework forbidding such dangerous actions as chroot to the user, and rendering huge chunks of system configuration non-modifiable. The promised "open mode", where you would own your own device, but not be able to access DRMed apps and media, never materialised,

The open mode is implemented, and apparently as of the beta2 for N950 the intended mechanism works. Users with N9's on PR1.0 are reporting that they can boot a minimally patched kernel into open mode.

Aegis is hindering my device usage in the name of protecting exactly fuck-all.

Just the same sort of crap as a typical Android phone, and just as open to abuse

Really? You mean preventing user apps from doing dangerous things without the user's knowledge is just as open to abuse as allowing everything?

Too many ambitious but clueless users on N900 have had to have their hands held through manually fixing or flashing their devices because they thought installing rootsh was cool. If it had been a mainstream device, I think there would have been a lot of exploits for it ...

Since the N9 was intended (until Feb 12) to be a mainstream device, it really wouldn't have been a good idea to have gone with the totally open mode of N900.

Reading around in the Meego Forum Thread on this topic, I found the following tidbits:

1-They are trying to dodge the MeeGo question, as asked directly in this IRC chat

2-Nokia have also noticed this, as seen by this tweet by a guy for for Qt/MeeGo at Nokia.

3-However, a Company called Novomok will provide Tizen with Qt, so...huh?

4- Also, Intel App up will be supported, and that's based on Qt apps, so yeah.

Reading around in the Meego Forum Thread on this topic, I found the following tidbits:

1-They are trying to dodge the MeeGo question, as asked directly in this IRC chat

2-Nokia have also noticed this, as seen by this tweet by a guy for for Qt/MeeGo at Nokia.

3-However, a Company called Novomok will provide Tizen with Qt, so...huh?

4- Also, Intel App up will be supported, and that's based on Qt apps, so yeah.

What options does this leave for Qt-based development on embedded platforms?

Maemo on the N900 felt like the right direction with Nokia backing Qt, especially with projects like PySide created soley to offer a LGPL-licensed Python wrapper available to commercial developers (as opposed to PyQt). This permitted a single codebase to target desktop and mobile/tablet environments using a pleasant and completely open toolchain. MeeGo was set to carry on with Qt/X11.

But according to MeeGo's updated website, "We believe the future belongs to HTML5-based applications, outside of a relatively small percentage of apps, and we are firmly convinced that our investment needs to shift toward HTML5."

When you get XWindows and Gnome/KDE to run efficiently on ARM, you let me know and THEN we'll talk about portability

Heh... You mean, with this?

Maemo.

Or, perhaps, you mean with this:

Meego

Or even further...

OpenPandora

The only thing that Android has over those is that the mobile companies got behind it FIRST. Nothing else. XWindows isn't the problem. Hell, even GNOME/KDE isn't really the problem, especially with the class of resources you'll find with most of the ARM devices you're finding in the handhelds or tablets. It's only a sort-of problem with something that has 128MiB of RAM and then only sort-of.

Putting it simply, you haven't a clue about what you're talking about if you're basing this all on what you just tried to run up the flagpole here.

(Ignoring sarcasm) The Final Release candidate of Meego 1.2 Developer edition for the n900 can be found here. Presumably this will become final-final shortly.

The annual (linux) Meego conference is in a few days' time, in San Francisco. Google News (search) reveals that the Nokia N950, the successor to the N900 will be _probably_ be announced at this conference.

Nokia has never backed-off its support for Meego. Well, okay they have hyped and now focused development resources towards their M$ partnership, but to the extent possible given their current business strategies, they still support their prior open-source OS strategy. In other words, they haven't really backed-away from Meego, while they will support WP7 going-forward. (But in lieu of the recent M$ partnership, they need to hype M$, especially following that particular announcement).

http://sf2011.meego.com/

Vote with your feet folks. Meego is still a very good mobile OS worth buying and developing for; especially if you are developing for your own purposes. Today's news reinforces this.

Looks like you can hack MeeGo onto it too:

http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/TEGRA2#Viewsonic_G_Tablet

Android barely qualifies as a form of "Linux." Yes, it uses a Linux kernel, but the fact is largely incidental - there's no real technical reason that Android couldn't be built on BSD or even WinCE if Google or an OEM wanted it. It isn't close to POSIX-compatible, it only runs "managed" (VM-based) apps, and it isn't even open-source as of 3.0.

So install MeeGo. MeeGo is quite strongly aligned with the upstream projects it makes use of. It really is a desktop Linux distribution for mobile devices.

As a Nokia N900 owner, I'm really impressed with the front facing video camera and skype integration. Skype is pre-installed, and Firefox mobile 3 is the default browser too. (Firefox 4 mobile is has officially been released for 1 month now for Maemo & Android and seems nice and faster too). Yesterday I did a 3.5 g skype video call that went really well between Europe and the USA, in the middle of a national holiday in the capital; the folks back home were impressed.

I digress. I like how the N900 profile feature lets me set availability to groups of apps like Skype, Jabber, SIP, etc. paired with my common net-connections like home wifi & mobile 3g. The contact book shows me who is online and available options to contact them, (Skype w/ status, SIP, cell, IM etc.) Also notifications is pretty sweet. It is a very nice linux PIM piece o' hardware. I for one, am looking forward to the next Meego device, the N950; to be most-likely announced next month at the Meego conference. (Where Meego 1.2 will also become available for N900 devices as well).

http://maemo.nokia.com/features/contacts/

http://sf2011.meego.com/

07:46, 1 March 2011 Jukkaeklund (Talk | contribs) (518 bytes) (Created page with "= MeeGo 1.2 Hacker Edition for N900 = Target is to make MeeGo in N900 usable as one's primary device in selected use cases. The focus is on the non-functional targets (which are")

According to this http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/meego-qa/2011-March/001167.html and http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/DeveloperEdition MeeGo was not abandoned. Maybe it was moved to background, but not abandoned

According to this http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/meego-qa/2011-March/001167.html and http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/DeveloperEdition MeeGo was not abandoned. Maybe it was moved to background, but not abandoned

Also, Maemo was a far better & way more open operating system than Android. [my emphasis]

Hey, don't write Maemo off yet, have you seen the price of second-hand n900s? Not bad for a 16-month old phone. And new ones (what little stock some people may have) are barely cheaper than when they came out (in the UK at least). Carphone Warehouse (big UK mobile seller, all carriers + unlocked mobile-only) had some on their website this week at £350 (really cheap for new). I rang them to check some details and they had 4 left in stock; by the time I had my card out and was ordering online, they were all gone.

Maemo lives on in Meego, and Nokia (despite what you've heard) hasn't given up on Meego:

http://meego.com/community/blogs/petermeego/2011/nokia-appoints-new-head-meego-efforts

Granted, it looks like one last roll of the dice, without strategic buy-in, but a clever company somewhere (probably out east) will be taking notice.

There's a mobile handset platform, recently downgraded to redheaded step child status and soon to be locked in the basement by the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world. It's a very nice platform. It could use the boost a company like Motorola investing in it and joining up with Intel in supporting it.

MeeGo.

Unfortunately, I don't think Motorola has much interest in putting an actual open platform on their phones. Pity.

Jukka Eklund at Nokia writes to the Meego Dev list: "I am thrilled to announce a little thing we started at Nokia. Basically we want to have MeeGo running in N900 device, so that it's really usable as your daily development device. Basic Handset UX should work, phone calls, SMS, web browsing. So we are concentrating on a few selected features and polish those to be "perfect". It might mean that we leave out some things in MeeGo 1.2 trunk for this edition, but that is not the default intention.

We are doing this fully on the open, and I hope this is an interesting project where we all in the community work towards the same goal: have a great MeeGo edition in the N900. This work is naturally based on the great work done already by N900 adaptation team lead by Harri and Carsten.

The wiki is up here: http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/DeveloperEdition. It will populated with more information as we go, thanks for the patience.

Br,
Jukka
Developer Edition product manager" ...Also folks, be sure to stay tuned for the new Nokia N950 meant only as a (likely) unsubsidized Developer's hardware refresh of the N900. Only rumor has it that it will not arrive with a slide-out keyboard. How important is having a N900-style keyboard to you, along with the new Meego Love Nokia software continues to offer?"

[note this was posted as an article Saturday and wasn't accepted as newsworthy by Slashdot. I cannot imagine why not.]

Jukka Eklund at Nokia writes to the Meego Dev list: "I am thrilled to announce a little thing we started at Nokia. Basically we want to have MeeGo running in N900 device, so that it's really usable as your daily development device. Basic Handset UX should work, phone calls, SMS, web browsing. So we are concentrating on a few selected features and polish those to be "perfect". It might mean that we leave out some things in MeeGo 1.2 trunk for this edition, but that is not the default intention.

We are doing this fully on the open, and I hope this is an interesting project where we all in the community work towards the same goal: have a great MeeGo edition in the N900. This work is naturally based on the great work done already by N900 adaptation team lead by Harri and Carsten.

The wiki is up here: http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/DeveloperEdition. It will populated with more information as we go, thanks for the patience.

Br,
Jukka
Developer Edition product manager" ...Also folks, be sure to stay tuned for the new Nokia N950 meant only as a (likely) unsubsidized Developer's hardware refresh of the N900. Only rumor has it that it will not arrive with a slide-out keyboard. How important is having a N900-style keyboard to you, along with the new Meego Love Nokia software continues to offer?"

[note this was posted as an article Saturday and wasn't accepted as newsworthy by Slashdot. I cannot imagine why not.]

Yes. Download

This "Armel" flavor is used, among other things, as a base for Maemo (and I guess for MeeGo too).

Nah, Intel based their Moblin on something RedHat/Fedora-ish, and Nokia joined in with that for MeeGo. No more apt-get for future Nokia phones. :(

This "Armel" flavor is used, among other things, as a base for Maemo (and I guess for MeeGo too).

Or better yet, soon you'll be able to skip straight to MeeGo, and avoid the next round of mobile OS bullshit altogether.

Or you can go learn about eFuses and reflashing with custom builds and then get back to me, whatever...

MeeGo?

What about MeeGo? Already runs on the Nokia N900's ARM processor.

"The plus for Intel is that as they unify their operating systems, we now have the ability for the first time... to have a designed-from-scratch, touch-enabled operating system for tablets that runs on Intel that we don't have today," the Intel CEO said.

It is also a pity no one at Intel has head of http://meego.com/ (sarcasm intended).

I'd bet for a distro based on MeeGo (or MeeGo itself). In general, the conventional Linux distributions are still stuck in the desktop/laptop interface and that's clear if you look at the picture shown in TFA. I'll spend a couple days playing around with the Nokia MeeGo image for the N900 to see how it goes, but the screenshots look promising. That could be the future of Linux (non-Android) GUIs for mobile devices.

Yes, Meego is specifically designed for smaller screens and has a touch based interface design from the start. It works with current Dell netbooks which probably share a lot with the Duo.

Yes, Meego is specifically designed for smaller screens and has a touch based interface design from the start. It works with current Dell netbooks which probably share a lot with the Duo.

This post is full of FUD.

Nope. There's also more supporting details I neglected to mention.

At the point when the feature freeze came along before the release of KOffice version 2.3, Nokia wanted to continue developing some features.

The most significant of which being a major restructuring of the code that touched large parts of the codebase for the benefit of Nokia's mobile app, yes. I even read the "testing done" bit on the review request and it didn't even mention any testing of the actual KOffice apps, just of Nokia's FreOffice.

As good citizens in the community this is being done in a work branch in SVN.

Which, as best I can tell, has become effectively the "real" trunk, with the actual official SVN trunk being relegated to backported bugfixes and few developers even testing it except when they encounter a bug in the work branch they need to test.

Far more of the mailing list discussion (and the vast majority of review requests) seems to be about FreOffice than the desktop UI, the apparent consensus amongst developers is that mobile is the future, and KOffice is having huge issues actually getting a release out because most of the developers are working to Nokia's release schedule and goals.

This said, It's not impossible that team B (being almost all of the previous KOffice community) will continue to work from the work branch as the new trunk

Which is what they were effectively doing already, except that bugfixes got merged into the 2.3 development branch and pulled from there rather than vice-versa. They'd already largely abandoned the "official" KOffice development and release process in favour of what Nokia wanted - I suppose at least this way they might actually make the change official.

Inge Wallin
KOffice developer

You also appear to do a fair of PR and announcements - and even the odd conference session and demo - for Nokia's FreOffice...

This.

Meego defines the OS, but there's nothing saying an implementation of it has to be ugly. Nokia, please for the love of silicon,

-get rid of those "laughing amigos". They might look cute to (some) geeks, but to no one else.
-get some artists to create some nice icohttp://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1869804&cid=34239488#ns, you know antialiased, glossy, shiny stuff. Not the pathetic 2D ugly colored ones you have now.
-either depreciate the name of the OS, or you should have picked a better name (Amigo woudn't have been bad)

http://meego.com/devices/handset/handset-screenshots

...and what are they thinking wearing those shoes with that purse?

I will agree, the cartoon things look stupid. But I'm smart enough not to care. You can make any theme you want once it is finished.

Why should they take even a second away from development work to please the fashionistas and marketing slobs?

This.

Meego defines the OS, but there's nothing saying an implementation of it has to be ugly. Nokia, please for the love of silicon,

-get rid of those "laughing amigos". They might look cute to (some) geeks, but to no one else.
-get some artists to create some nice icons, you know antialiased, glossy, shiny stuff. Not the pathetic 2D ugly colored ones you have now.
-either depreciate the name of the OS, or you should have picked a better name (Amigo woudn't have been bad)

http://meego.com/devices/handset/handset-screenshots

It sounds like MeeGoo will be just another closed system like iOS.

"MeeGo is an open source project created by merging the Moblin and Maemo software platforms, and is led by the MeeGo Technical Steering Group (TSG). The governance model is based on meritocracy and the best practices and values of the Open Source culture. The MeeGo project lives under the auspices of the Linux Foundation."

http://meego.com/about/governance

Not so closed. Not single manufacturer.

I would poke around some of the N900 focused forums, they may already be capable of what you're looking for and if not someone may have figured out how to add it already.

talk.maemo.org would be a good starting point.

And a few pointers:
Concerns about the calendar; closed-source UI [WONTFIX], backend component open though.
HOWTO: Syncevolution with N900 and wiki.
status of Ubuntu One Client
Meego on N900 may offer better possibilities, but it's not there yet.

for Meego on N900, see Harri Hakulinen's recent blog post in which he declares his views for a bright future for Meego on N900.

The Nokia N900 really does just run a desktop Linux stack. From that perspective you can do whatever you want with it pretty easily. Things like SyncEvolution work on the N900. That said, Nokia's Maemo is in the process of being merged with Intel's Moblin into MeeGo. It may be worth waiting to see what Nokia's first MeeGo phone is like and perhaps getting that in preference to the N900.

You can also have MeeGo or Android running on the N900. And besides that, it is sweet to have a phone where you have root.

Clippit: "Looks like you intend to get a BlackBerry device. Would you like help?
[ ] Order Nokia E7.
[ ] Wait for MeeGo.
[ ] STFU and let me order my BlackBerry device."

Rip out the jvm and allow first class native code and I might think about it.

Then you might want to look at supporting MeeGo as it gets off the ground.

http://qt.nokia.com/products/whats-new-in-qt
http://meego.com/about/licensing-policy

?

Android, without the the "silly jvm", wouldn't that be Linux? Like Meego?

1. Ditch the goal of moving Symbian to anything beyond dumb phones with cameras

Many people outside of US still use it and want some compatibility with their old phones.

2. Change the name of Meego to ANYTHING ELSE

MeeGo is just the name of the SDK / developer platform. Most consumers will not see that name when they purchase the phone.

3. Release Meego completely OSS and don't hamper people wanting to go in and tinker

You can now.

4. Start rolling out both (Official stock) Android and Meego on devices and allow for the devices to switch back and forth between the two

You can run MeeGo on N900. I think you can install Android on it too. MeeGo is not ready for any other device yet; not because Nokia doesn't want you to port it, simply because MeeGo doesn't have to features yet to handle any other kind of phone. Nokia doesn't think MeeGo is ready for primetime yet so you will not see it on any other phone for some time.

5. Release a marketing campaign to choose 'the next look of Nokia'

Wait until Q2 2011. I am not allowed to say anything else.

6. Analyze which OS is getting better market traction and phase out the loser

Nokia already said that they are moving to Linux/MeeGo. Qt is the "bridge" to move developers from one to another (just like how Carbon was used to move from MacOS classic to MacOS X). Talking to the people at Nokia, they already consider Symbian to be "legacy" and are already moving to MeeGo.

7.Profit More!

I hope Nokia will.

You can have the source.

http://meego.com/downloads

What's happening in fact is the proprietary mobile telcos are under pressure from all directions. Google and even more significantly, Nokia. Apple.... yeah... well...

The Internet is still there. The PC is still there. You now have all that moving mobile. It's more, not less.

Well Symbian has Nokia behind it, and they aren't a small company.

But I'm not persuaded it's all about the companies backing it. The soon to be released, MeeGo phones have Nokia backing too (as well as Intel) but I'm much more excited about that than Symbian. Having a fairly standard Linux stack on my phone is something I love about my N900 and I'm looking forward to its successor.