Mer for Nokia 770,N800, N810, N810W, X86, Beagleboard, Pocket Loox 720, version 0.8

Information about Mer can be found at http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer and release information and released files on http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Releases/0.8. It also has a list of known issues so please read them through first before installing.

If you own a N8x0(W), use the installer mentioned here. 770 instructions here. If you have VirtualBox, VMware, QEMU or Parallels, try out our VMDK or RAW images. Beagleboard and Pocket Loox 700-series instructions now available.

Next release is 2 March 2009 (0.9).

Highlights of this release:
* You no longer need to ctrl-M to press enter in the x86 versions
* Packages which uses maemo-select-menu-location can now be installed
* Hildonized Midori bundled (thanks to the developer, still a svn version though)
* Theme switcher & status bar/panel customization, control panel applet
* Open system sounds
* Ability to install Ubuntu Mobile applications (tasks-hildon, for instance, cheese-hildon)
* Ability to install a bit more gnome applications (gnome-core is still limited by libvte seam)
* Power saving of wifi should work
* Nokia RX-44 and RX-48 keymaps added but not yet automatically detected by HAL. There is a command in 'Known issues' listing how to deal with it temporarily. A fix will be available through updates eventually along with XKB configuration.
* BeagleBoard port. If you are interested in Maemo5 on BeagleBoard, you can contribute to the Maemo on BeagleBoard project - it is a good way to help Maemo5 become more cross-platform.
* Pocket Loox 720 port (HaReT boot from WinMobile). If you have a gadget with touchscreen that has a Linux kernel & X plus touchscreen support booting, with EABI, and is ARMv5TE or higher, come talk to us to get a port going to it.)
* Hildon session script now detects wether it should show a cursor or not based on touchscreen availability.
* Maemo Extras repository added to default repository list.

Mer is still a work in progress and as such you should not expect too much of it - feel free to join and help us out if you think something is missing

Thanks to the people involved in the sprint 0.8 that has lead to this release: b-man, wazd, zenvoid, Jaffa, johnx, DarkenCZ, qwerty12, RST38h, r2d2rogers, Meizirkki, thopiekar and timeless and others who contributed but not mentioned here.

If you would like to participate, read through http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/People and http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Sprints and see if there's anything you can help out with. We're on #maemo (or #mer) on FreeNode, IRC, if you'd like to hang out and discuss.

As you can read above we have added Maemo Extras to the default application catalogue list. Why did we do this?

We have done it to highlight where your (Extras developers) applications might have problems when it is put in an environment more aligned with mainstream Linux - and also to find out where we need to work on Mer to make it more compatible with the Maemo platform. It is also a showcase to show how much can already be installed directly into Mer - as we try to be backwards compatible with Maemo.

Together with this release, we invite you developers to check your application from within Mer (you can probably do it on X86 too, - extras-devel are built for i386 too.) and see why they don't install, or not work/start (check ~/.xsession-errors). - You are also very welcome to try and build your applications (do it under x86, it is like developing for a Debian platform, if it works under x86, it probably builds in our armel builders too)

You are welcome to tell us where we are not compatible with Maemo platform - and we hope that you can use this experience to adapt your application to Mer (and mainstream Linux) early on - and share your experiences and problems in this thread or in bug reports to Mer.

Obligatory screenshots: