Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Okay, Listen very carefully I shall say this only once.

EDIT: For those too damn lazy to read the whole post, please read: You're in good hands. Stop worrying. Your N900 won't break when Maemo6 or MeeGo comes out, or be less useful. If you want details, read the post.

First, some background. I'm maemo.org distmaster, which means I facilitate operating system development in the community. In the past year, I have been working on the Mer project, which was a project to put an alternative and community supported OS on Nokia tablets and other devices. I know a darned lot about how these devices work and the organisational aspects of OS development on them by working on them for a very long time. I work on bringing Maemo 5.0 to Nokia N800, N810(W).

I've had to deal with Nokia in many different ways in this role and I've been met with respect and understanding when I've approached them with logical and organisationally sound arguments.

This should be enough in terms of argument by authority, merit and hopefully logically sound arguments. If you can't accept either, don't keep on reading, but don't complain about this issue from now on.

So, let's start dissection the argument: "Nokia not bringing MeeGo or Maemo6 to N900".

First off, let's look at our raw material - the N900. You see a cellphone. It requires updates from vendor to get new features, it will stop getting updates when vendor stops caring and there's nothing we can do about it.

Instead, I see a mobile computer. Remember your PC? The same way you could install Vista on your PC or XP or even Ubuntu or other crazy operating systems, this is possible on your N900 - you do not have to rely on your hardware vendor to provide a OS for your device. On a PC, you rely on them providing drivers for your computer. It's the same on a N900 - drivers, kernel, battery management and so on.

So, first question you should ask instead:

• Will Nokia as a hardware vendor continue to provide drivers for N900 for MeeGo and Maemo 6? (Will they devote resources to do this or help community to do this themselves)

If Nokia will do this, it's obvious that community versions for N900 of MeeGo and Maemo 6 can exist. Even if the drivers aren't open source - Nokia is very flexible in this regard and has shown this in the past.

Next question is for yourself:

• Do you trust that the community is capable of producing a production quality MeeGo or Maemo 6 for N900, if it had technical assistance by Nokia for driver issues? And would you use it?

Next step. You're worried you are getting left behind in terms of applications from 3rd parties targetting Maemo6 and MeeGo.

No, because they are targetting the "Qt" framework which we already have on the N900, even on Maemo5. We have also seen Maemo6/Harmattan UI libraries running on Maemo5. What are you worrying about? It looks quite compatible to me. With OBS in MeeGo, it would even be possible to rebuild straight for Maemo5 with little effort.

That question would then be:

• Will applications coded for MeeGo/Maemo6 be possible to build for Maemo5 with little effort?

So, next step: Maemo 6 isn't just drivers. Some of you also would like to see the stack of Nokia applications from Maemo6/Nokia MeeGo versions brought to N900 (Ovi Maps, Media player and other programs I don't use that much). This is a more difficult question as it relies on organisational issues and if it makes economic sense and sells devices.

It also depends on capabilities of the hardware (If N900 doesn't have lasers, of course the "Evil Mastermind" program that requires lasers on your device won't work).

The question would then be:

• Will Nokia be using the cross-platformness of MeeGo APIs to bring their software stack to all Nokia devices running the MeeGo platform (community or vendor-originated)?

Now, can we please stop worrying about all this stuff and love the fact we're having a device as open as a PC to bring us things when a corporate entity might not - and a community capable of bringing us the features anyway? And that we are getting a fully open platform (MeeGo) that we can easily get on our devices. And even so, Maemo5 has a -long- life ahead of it still. You aren't getting forgotten after this announcement.

My recommendation is to start asking this set of questions in a constructive manner. Panicking isn't the solution here - look at what's actually possible and what -you- can do to help the situation. Panicking sure doesn't help the situation and just creates noise so nothing gets done.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

im guessing around the time of the next firmware update a meego n900 firmware will pop up on the meego site for testing.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

lol too long man.. Too much to read

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Grab some coffee and read it through. There's no short version to this as people will be picking apart at the arguments if it was too short.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

I agree completly.....although It is 4am here and I have to wake up in a few hours. I have a better excuse for not reading the whole thing.:cool:

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Yet another post makes me wish there were a 'double-thanks' button. :p

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

could someone sum it. :)

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

or a thanks button with with the ability to add a high five!

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Seing the openness of meego i'd say the most important is question #1.
But the only driver that i'm sure is closed is the 3d driver.

So we should bug nokia asking for a open driver or at least a easy way to have it installed (see nvidia)

The other things do not concern me as i trust nokia. Meego is a good choice.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Something about we're all going to die but the devs will make sure that the N900 always has an innovativel o/s. There might have been something about a teapot...

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Moot points, all of them. When Nokia release their brand new and funky N950 (or whatever) with Maemo 6, I expect 99% of us will purchase one and forget about the N900.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

i know i wont be purchasing one, 600 bucks for a new phone/tablet is alot man xD

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

An excellent post, with many very good point, some already known, some clarified, but sadly, I don't think it's what the 'will it run on my...' (Drink!) crowd can (or even wants to) understand. As we have seen, these people want a yes/no answer and, worse yet, they expect it from Nokia. It's total tunnel vision, the technical, organizational, and any other differences are not important, they yet to grasp what proper Open software means and how it can impact their existing device's present and future abilities (and in light of that what they should REALLY be fighting for). That said, I applaud the 'can do' approach and devotion of many community platform developers, especially you, for the work on Maemo (=Mer), and hopefully MeeGo so we can bring as much of these as possible to our past, present and future devices, and the community at large. Thank you.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Could it be that your brain has become too short, if you cant read as short a text as this well argued message?

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

finally .. a positive outlook :) ..

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

I think Maemo 5.0 on N8X0 would indeed proof your point! Succes on that!

Besides that, you convinced me already. I trust there will be a lot of other community members / developers giving this an effort to make our N900 even better.
And no, my N900 isn't broken at all, I'm enjoying it big time!

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

made me feel a lots better and more positive this morning many thx

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Basically it says "Don't worry, be happy :)"

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

My personal belief is that the situation is even BETTER than how stskeeps has itemised.

Not only should you not worry, but be prepared for a new age of choice, increased innovation, standardization, and use-ability.

Choice

This is very difficult for people that don't run a Linux desktop to understand, so perhaps a little explanations is in order.

1. I have a PC. I don't rely on Microsoft or Apple to give me operating system updates.
2. I can run a range of Linux variants on my PC. There are 100s of variants, but lets take the two that are most similar in approach to MeeGo as examples, Namely Redhat Linux and Novell SuSE.

3. I use these as examples not because they happen to use RPMs for software distribution containers, but because they are SOLD and supported by professional companies that need to make money to stay alive. You could lump Ubuntu here , but I digress.

4.Both Red Hat and Novell have community driven versions of their flagship operating systems, called Fedora, and Open SuSE respectively.

5.I can choose to use the professional versions from both Redhat and Novell, which have greater stability, and typically are paid for box sets with annual support charges (thats how they make their money) but as a user I know when I place a support call to them they will look into it and provide patches and help trouble shoot problems. Downside though is these version typically get less advanced features, less updates.

Or I can choose to use Fedora or Open SuSE. They have latest features, bleeding edge functions and get very frequent updates at no cost to me and are free to download. They have thriving communities, lots of informal help, and shed loads of applications.

no doubt many variants of MeeGo will materialze as we have already seen in Moblin. And it will put more pressure on the ARM vendors to release drivers for MeeGo.


Increased innovation

Meego now has the resources to become mainstream and upstream distribution. It already has downstream variants with major support from all three of the major Linux vendors.

-Novell SuSE Moblin will become MeeGo
-Fedora Mini a Moblin based distro will become MeeGo
-Ubuntu Remix will become MeeGo

and now Maemo will become MeeGo, and I assume Mer will become “Open MeeGo”.

With so much “wood behind the same arrow” innovation will accelerate

Standardization

The biggest complaints from old Tablet owners is Nokia's constant change of the base OS. But today we find that MeeGo is now owned by the Linux Foundation, Keepers of the unification effort of Linux called the Linux Standards Base LSB. Many of the Linux wars like Gnome vs KDE, composite managers, Sound API's, Media containers etc etc have all pretty much settled down. Nokia has been brought into the Mainstream, and is now part of Mainstream that it will be less able to make “dumb decisions” on its own. There will be more eyeballs and more interested parties in making sure that the platform is a success for its Developers and users.

Useability

Imagine Qt is the standard development tookit for MeeGo. Imagine the productivity gains across MeeGo,Symbian,Linux etc. More cosistant UI's across not just he OS but the applications as well.

I believe that our N900's will have a longer and more exciting life with Meego than without.

Bring on the MeeGo Nokia Booklet. :D

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

I think those that want to fully depend on community support would appreciate a gesture by Nokia if they open source all the hardware drivers for N900 :)

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Kernel drivers are already open, but the good thing is - they don't need to open battery management, etc, just allow people to distribute them to Nokia devices and set up a legal framework for this. They are very flexible.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Drivers are not Nokias to gift.
MeeGo will put more pressure on OMAP vendors to "Donate"

Coincidence of recent TI 3D drivers ?

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

@mikec: I thought it (partly) depends on Nokia's licensing terms with them?

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Thank you! I've been trying to say that for days but you've summed it up in a far more concise way so now we can post a link pointing here instead of writing 1000s of words to explain the basic idea. This thread goes straight into bookmarks.

I'd argue that he cannot read properly (and that he purposefully edit quotes to say something that was not mentioned in the original post), just had a taste of that @ HERE :rolleyes: Why Stskeeps thanked him for that is beyond my comperhension, tho...

I think that Nokia's license from TI (and others vendors) refers only to their devices, so they cannot really open-source drivers not owned by them. Something like Adobe being unable to open-source the H.264 and On2 VP6 decoders... We should put pressure on all hardware manufacturers to open-source their drivers as the current situation is not much improved than it was in the old days of win modems...

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

For this part:

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Maybe the `MeeGo train` was a bad choice of words, but I'd consider what Quim Gil said to be an answer for many people approaching Nokia's floor at MWC to be pretty official.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Not to be an a**hole.. :p but all i see is a serie of questions without answers, exactly what we had so far... ;)

of course it all depends on Nokia and their support for drivers and the Nokia applications... but it's what is more important to calm people down... we allready know MeeGo will be (completely) opensource and thus not stopping us (the gurus in these forums) from installing it on the N900 (like with android) in case we have the drivers...

did I miss something illuminating? :p

Of course, seeing how small the effort would be for nokia to support the N900 (apart from new hardware features), I believe it will happen; but in the end, we just have to wait and have some official statements/answers, and just stay quiet and calm until that happens.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

I'm already not worried about it. But I expected to have Mer running on my N810 or N800 by now, and it's funny to get reassurance from the one in charge of that.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

why are people complaining! by the time a set of MeeGo handsets hits the market i'll only have 6months left on my contract anyways! enough time for MeeGo to come to fruit. And I can say with confidence that between now and that time i'd rather be using my n900 than any other device out there so whats the big problem?

the n900 is bleedin edge, bleedin edge doesnt last forever! this handset was always set to be defunct within a year, thats the nature of technology! Use it, be happy! then move on!

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

While this did make me feel at fault for this not happening, there were reasons for it.

On a personal sidenote, I managed to finish the software side of a research project, finish a master's degree in computer science, get married and move to Poland in the same time. And doing Mer for free. On the organisational sidenote, we were too ambitious and that harmed things (see mer-project.blogspot.com, the redshirt post).

We learnt a lot from the Mer project that makes things easier now both on N8x0 and in MeeGo. If you're wondering how smoother it could have been if we had been less ambitious (with the knowledge we have now), I just had Image Viewer from Fremantle X86 (no recompile for special Debian things) running on top of Debian 5.0+Fremantle base system in a VirtualBox. Coming sooner or later to a N8x0 near you. See http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=101 for Mer^2 stuff.

A small teaser in that regard:

http://www.daimi.au.dk/~cvm/mer2-imageviewer.png

But let us not turn this thread into a discussion about that - I'll gladly take it in another thread.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

This is a well thought out response to all the jitter and worrying that is going on out there since N900 just was released not long ago and now the thought of being terminated after spending over 500 bucks for it is really worrying many. Thanks for providing us with some insight of what the future looks like.

I have been a Nokia/Blackberry fan for many years. Nokia's have come a long way and the N900 is like the flagship with the integration of telephony. They will not kill it off that easy because it rivals a lot of things in the market. Its the new boom we needed in a cellphone. We will begin seeing some awesome things come from the community and Nokia in a joint effort to stay on top of marketshare and bring the company back into the spotlight and hopefully we will be there to see it all go down.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Worry: What a powerful emotion. But after the initial shock wears off, what a useless emotion. Just ask that dear you just hit. Or just ask that dude who suggested we stop filing bugs. Inaction worked for Gandhi because he represented the oppressed. Nokia is trying to do anything but. We're free men and women in a free software environment, idleness is how things die. Why some of you are here is beyond me, but if you're going to stay, get your emotions in check. And learn how to read.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Still, all this is speculation keepsie. You have no roadmap, no timeline, and very little concrete information to go on. How will it actually work? Will someone have to take packages like foo.rpm, turn them into a foo.deb, host them in some repo (public or private?), and rely on community support? If so, I think Debian Mobile might be a better option since they already have the infrastructure, security, and expertise to do something like this.

Some people from the Maemo community have already moved on and want to to start such a Debian Mobile project, it might be an excellent way to support the N900.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Nokia MeeGo Announcment confrence at Once Bercalona
in according to nokia the nokia n900 will be get it

about march-june 2nd quarter 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SNafLSS4JQ

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Great post, based on solid arguments, thanks!!

Exactly what I am worried about is the drivers and close applications support for the N900. Ovi Maps is an example of one technology that Nokia is betting on and is set to be completed (turn-by-turn navigation) on Harmattan only. Even if Meego base OS source is completely open every device maker will have customizations and applications to differentiate itself from competitors.

From my point of view Nokia is marketing N900 as a pocket computer but supporting it like a standard phone. Computer users expect it to be upgradable with supplier support, and those who bought it as a mobile expect at least the same level of features Symbian has now (Ovi Maps, Ovi Suite and a lot of other simple phone features that seems "crude" now)

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

I'm not sure where RPM vs DEB debate came in all this. There is a problem with Nokia claiming M6 is a MeeGo instance I am wondering a bit about from a technical point of view. On packaging level it hardly isn't, but on API/ABI level it might be (Qt libs). I'm pro-Dual packaging as we need to support both M6 and MeeGo.

I might not have a roadmap, but the questions I end up asking is relevant no matter what they plan. The transformation from Nokia as a OS vendor to a hardware vendor amongst many others and their commitment. The belief in the ability of a community to produce a production mobile OS. The ability to code for M5, M6 -and- MeeGo using Qt. Will Nokia use the cross-platform APIs to bring their own services and differentiation to not-so-new devices.

Instead of forking over a packaging change, I choose participation and collaboration as I like the big picture and I understand the reasoning. Even though I don't know a shred of .spec. I talk to the people involved, the community guys, the developers - they see our point of view on many things and we try to seek out a compromise - and we're creating a common community together.

Instead of ".rpm is a dealbreaker" and splitting, duplicating efforts for no good reason.

And I'm helping those out as well (it's my duty and my job), even though I don't agree with forking over a packaging choice that makes a lot of sense from organisational and toolset point of view. I don't agree with Gentoo or for that sakes raw Debian on N8x0 either, but I try to work with them as well.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

History will repeat itself. Someone here claimed N8x0 bugs on Maemo 4.0 will be fixed in 5.0; and then N810 is not supported in 5.0.

I own more than one N810s and more than one N800s. But I don't have a single N900. I skip the N900 because Nokia did not have N8x0 supported in 5.0.

I think 6.0 won't support N900 as 5.0 did not support N8x0.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

It is also the curse of having a OS vendor and HW vendor in one. This is what is getting seperated in MeeGo and what I've petitioned for, for a long time in Mer.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

Could you specify the time during the video when they directly say this? I watched the entire thing and the only thing I heard them say was that QT applications developed on the n900 would be "forward compatible" with future devices.

Re: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
 

I'm discouraged by people complaining about the length of this... but that's a societal rant for another time and place.

What I'm encouraged by is the message, and the number of Thanks by people with no problem reading it through.