Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

Hi,
I've been trying to search various threads but have not found the answer so I was hoping the gurus here would enlighten us.

With the announcement of Tizen, where does this leave the various community efforts to bring MeeGo / MeeGo-Harmattan CE / HE / ?E to the N900.

My guess is that they're all closed and CSSU is it. I would just appreciate it if someone would just say so explicitly.

Back when the N900 was just out if Nokia just stuck to their guns and held on to Maemo and knocked out Harmattan without the distraction of MeeGo I wonder if we'd be in a different place. I guess we'll never know.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

first off, with the announcement only made yesterday, I'd suggest that all parties are scrabbling to find ground and determine where things will go from here.

To my understanding I'm not aware of any efforts to bring harmattan to N900 in it's current N950/N9 form, so I guess there's no change there.

As for the N900CE (REAL Meego) builds, I can only hope that we'll see the 1.3 release before it all ends.

Given that Intel has been fairly specific about Tizen targetting Intel chipsets, I would think that all Arm ports of Meego may not have much of a future, so for those interested, now might be a good time to start downloading the non-oss components from the repo.

Don't assume that Meego was the distraction that caused all the grief for Nokia.
Nokia's decision to completely rewrite for Qt was the major hurdle for the quick and smooth progression of Fremantle to Harmattan, not their involvement with Meego.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

Got it. For some reason I remember a MeeGo-Harmattan HE or something but with all of the various iterations I probably misunderstood.

And for what purpose? There will be no MeeGo based products in the future

Harmattan is now the only MeeGo related release ever existing. As far as I recall while people mention MeeGo-compatible, I don't think that was ever officially stated by the MeeGo community or Intel. Again, I defer to others who would clarify more the exact situation.

Without the support of Nokia and closed source bits what use would this be for?

While I do not work for Nokia I'm sure there were many a meeting and many a technical discussion and many a what-if scenario charting how the Fremantle / Harmattan world changes in preparation for MeeGo. Any and all efforts around that would have taken away from the "smooth progression" of Fremantle to Harmattan. I mean just look at all of the threads on the forum.

I can only guess that resources poured into MeeGo could have also been better used with Harmattan. I would not say that MeeGo came at no cost. It certainly will bear no fruit.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

Harmattan's relationship to Meego is a lot looser than most realise. the compatibility aspects are what Nokia used to argue for using the "Meego" brand, and yet thanks to good marketing and a media that is happy to use catchy names, most people actually believe that the N9 is real Meego.

For those that would hope to continue developing Meego on Arm, having Noka's non-oss components (BME, Graphics Drivers etc) will allow this to continue, using the N900 as a reference platform, thus my suggestion that people may wish to ensure they have them.
As it stands LF has indicated that Meego will still live on as a seperate entitiy to Tizen, however without funding for servers and repo hosting, this is far from a guarantee that code will be accessible form a central source.
most of the nono-oss (nokia closed) components have seen ongoing development and are all stable enough for regular use (N900CE already using these wothout problems), so individuals wishing to pplay with Meego on the N900 will need these.
Harmattan development was already taking place within Nokia, before the push to Meego.
I'd argue that the Symbian development Teams in Nokia played a greater role in strangling Harmattan Development than Meego.
Re-writing Harmattan for Qt was supposed to ease the transition of applications and development when progression to "real" Meego took place at some undecided, future time.

For me, it's a disappointing outcome, but reflects a two-finger salute to Nokia by Intel, as, at this point the continuation of Qt for Tizen seems only to have a concrete base in netbook development with no firm answers coming from Intel as to other platforms.

there has been consistent talk for a long time that one of the reasons other hardware vendors weren't interested in Meego is due to Qt (Nokia owned) and the percieved leverage that this gave Nokia.
Intel has now done a three step dance (Moblin > Meego > Tizen) and still haven't produced anything substantial.

Having an OS for handsets is great (as most here at TMO would, these days, be less concerned about tablets and/or netbooks) but not having any handsets to put them on makes it a bit of a joke.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

ooh, ooh... I get to be a Negatron!

http://gerbick.com/images/Negatron.jpg

Debian based Maemo was shoved towards RPM based Moblin, and what came out from that year long attempt was the Debian based Harmattan on top of MeeGo 1.2 and not much more.

No comments about what Tizen will be based on, but I pretty much can guess that the update from MeeGo 1.2 to Tizen 1.x will not happen.

Okay, honestly... I don't know. But I can speculate. And to be honest, it's all too soon to start in on this discussion. It's easier to say "no, won't happen" than chase down what might happen when some planning and proper reactions are in place instead. That's my take.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

Agreed.

And the point would be?

In the end Maemo / Harmattan didn't have a chance regardless of how deep Nokia resources ran, as some like to suggest. This is a point that Elop-haters ignore, but maybe they're all ex-Nokia employees that worked on Symbian. Haha.

Why this had to be in the initial release of the N9 and not a PR 2.0 I will never understand.

Haha. Your British?

So what does Nokia have to do now to get Qt to work on WP?

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

I guess the point would be, some people will continue to play with Meego for the simple pleasure in tinkering with it.
i use it on my n900 and enjoy it for what it is, and what it has taught me about development and building in a Qt framework, from UI to application/hardware interaction.

Given elop's committment to WP i agree that it didn't appear to have a mainstream future (at least the near future) at Nokia.

Not British. at least I don;t think I whinge that much ;)

whilst already having a presence in windows Desktop environments, I'm not sure where Qt will go wrt WP.
All of the Marketing spin about the "next billion" was mainly in reference to s40 taking a foothold in developing markets like the asian continent, and although I haven't tried it, given that the wp sdk link on the Nokia website were all pointing to the MS sdk, i'd say Qt doesn't play a big role in WP at Nokia, but am happy to stand corrected.

@ gerbick. I'd be less inclined to call your words negative as opposed to pragmatic......

something to be said for kubuntu mobile on the N900: deb based, support for qt through kde and fully open source (except for the non-oss drivers to get it working smoothly on the n900 ;) )

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

I guess so. If this was some variant of Harmattan I'd think it would be nice, but MeeG0 1.3? I mean there are absolutely 0 apps.

Maybe. Strangely enough it seems Android 2.x development is hotter than it's ever been and with component prices dropping I can see Android making a run at that. What might that look like is anyone's guess but I don't think Nokia will win it without a fight.

I still think the S40 / Symbian / WP Strategy has a few gaps. Just a few. ;-)

You're right. As far as I'm aware, Qt doesn't play any role in WP. I just wonder though, if they were able to get it to work. Does that change the game? Yet another level of differentiation for Nokia. Just curious.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

Not quite, there has already been a reasonable amount of effort that's gone into creating apps for meego, including ports of existing arm based stuff and others from the mameo lineup.
obviously not enough to appeal to mainstream users, but for hobbyists and ppeople who might continue to develop for arm in qt?

I agree that Elop's strategy (Plan A - WP, Plan B - make Plan A work) is strategically and professionally irresponsible, however, having said that, and knowing that despite the Intel move to Tizen, Meego will remain an OS project under the LF and as such, Nokia still has freedom to continue to use it for R&D (and possibly a board supported "Plan C" if Elop's strategy fails)

Qt on the otherhand is a whole lot more than Nokia. KDE is a big player in the Desktop environment and a lot of work is going into developing KDE (and Plasma) for mobile-centric environments. Qt will live on for a long time and with Swipe UI getting good reviews wordlwide, it showcases the benefits of developign with Qt/QML.

Qt for WP? who knows, but nokia will need something, and given that samsung has just jumped into bed with MS over licensing, which apparently will include flexibility in UI development for WP on their handsets, Nokia will need something amazing to differentiate themselves from the market.

given that the current reviews of Mango are more of an "about time MS caught up to the rest of the crowd" statement than any real innovation, it will be interesting times. The funny thing is, the biggest thing most have had to say is the talk of live widgets being able to integrate dynamically and the threaded SN messaging improvement (ironic that nokia dropped Maemo/Harmattan, when it already had this 2 years ago...)

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

I meant Qt on Nokia phones I guess someone else could do the same. I don't know who else would though... on plane soon.. last post.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

Hi,

Quick comment: We're still alive, kicking and we are just finishing up last touches of the N950 release before we do a formal announcement of the Fall Release.

We have rebased on MeeGo 1.3 Core instead and it brings along immense performance improvements and honestly, it feels very good and useful.

The CE has just moved on to a new steering group form based on meritocracy - and they will decide the direction of CE going forward. The steering group members are:

Jukka Eklund (jukkaeklund), Tom Swindell (alterego), Marko Saukko (Sage), Carsten Munk (Stskeeps), Vesa-Matti Hartikainen (veskuh)

What will this new Tizen news mean in practice? Remember, that when it comes down to everything, most Linux distributions share a same set of packages for basic system software, like bash, glibc, etc. It means that you share the load of work.

The Tizen news makes compliance a hell lot easier. You need to be sure to implement the HTML5 + WAC apis for html5 apps, that's it. Compared to "you shalt have this version of glib".

It's easy to imagine simple Tizen deriatives that uses Qt for it's differentiation. Tizen uses OBS and RPM, too - and has a ARM port based on the effort put into MeeGo.

Initial thoughts, from myself, is simply to run a Tizen deriative that includes Qt and that we can sit the CE UI on top.

Needless to say, we're still active and contributions are coming in. Hope you'll enjoy the Fall release.

P.S. We have a Intel architecture build of the CE image now too.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

@ stskeeps
thanks for the update. Can you advise if intel is willing to continue support (at least in the short term) for the N900CE team, in the form of bugfixes etc, or should we expect a move to Tizen core after the formal 1.3 release wiht a focus on Qt integration?

support your comments re the latest daily build. much quicker and more responsive all round. thanks for all your (and the entire N900Ce team) hard work.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

Let's see how things go - Intel will probably only focus on Tizen, but keep in mind that it's very likely Tizen shares a -lot- with MeeGo Core.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

So Tizen basically is Meego with gtk/qt stripped out?

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

s/stripped out/not required for compliance/g

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

I can't talk for CSSU, but from my perspective, MeeGo CE is not closed. How exactly we'll continue work is still a bit up in the air, but it will happen, as there's a lot of determined individuals and invested companies in keeping MeeGo ticking over.

See: http://blog.rburchell.com/2011/09/be...en-source.html for some links to some of the discussions ongoing, and "watch this space" as it says.

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

I can't talk for Meego CE but one can check commits and merge requests here and draw his/her conclusions whether CSSU is closed

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

Well, that's part of it. Will they be in the core repo, or (assuming compliance policy equivalent or more braindead than meego's) will every Qt/GTK+ app have to bundle the entire stack along with it?

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

No exact clue. The important thing is that it's not banned. The app story is HTML5.

What I personally care about is the core stack

Re: Post Tizen - MeeGo / Harmattan for N900?
 

@Stskeeps - Thanks for the update. It's good to see the progress you continue to make. When might there be a version of MeeGo that is usable on a daily basis. Would that run N9 apps without modification?

I'm just trying to nail down what is there for the N900 coming in the future besides CSSU updates. Thanks.