After I dared to peek at one of the meego mailing list threads, I discovered that it's been reported that Meego is planned as uncompatible with other distros upstream, in several ways. This has been defined as a benefit.
Also, it seems that the devices incarnating this os could be even more inclined to the phone side than the computer side.
Of course, at present this is only speculation, like a married couple planning the hair and eyes color of their future kids.
But I'm not sure I like it
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] RPM vs DEB, the FAQ item?
On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 20:45, Auke Kok <auke-jan.h.kok@intel.com> wrote:
[...]
Also, it really doesn't matter either way. Moblin was never compatible with fedora (rpms) and never meant to be either. Nor was that ever intended: We want to bring highly optimized packages for mobile platforms to you, not generic desktop-focused packages. This means we strip out unneeded components in many places. That affects dependencies overall, and so no matter what packaging system is used - it will be incompatible with <deb/rpm/insertyourfavoritedistro'spackageformat>. (because we want it to be incompatible: it gives us a benefit).
And in a following message, an excerpt from IRC:
#meego 16 Feb 22:33 UK time
<auke> the ability to pull from fedora (e.g.) comes at a huge cost
<auke> we don't want to pay that cost for mobile platforms
<lbt> we say "this isn't a phone"
<lbt> "it's a computer"
<lbt> "but we're going to cripple it"
<auke> I rather see it from the other perspective: it's a phone, BUT we can make it do more cool stuff
<auke> computers have 102key keyboards
<auke> and 24inch screens
<auke> and a picture of your mother on the desktop
<auke> also, I really think that for most desktop PC's a /moblinesque/ base distro is more than enough
<auke> and I think everyone would love to have their computers boot in 5 seconds
After I dared to peek at one of the meego mailing list threads, I discovered that it's been reported that Meego is planned as uncompatible with other distros upstream, in several ways. This has been defined as a benefit.
Also, it seems that the devices incarnating this os could be even more inclined to the phone side than the computer side.
Of course, at present this is only speculation, like a married couple planning the hair and eyes color of their future kids.
But I'm not sure I like it
Could you please elaborate on what you mean with "mobile setting"?
I think the devices MeeGo will run on will have at least 256MB rootfs and
several GBs of extra flash.
Could you give some concrete examples of standard packages which had to
be modified to work on such a platform?
Documentation is often in separate optional packages or could be removed by something
like docpurge. The /opt problem could be solved by keeping / on eMMC and symlinking
system files from NAND. Optimizations could be send upstream.
So except for the set of packages, what does really need be modified for a mobile setting?
Could you please elaborate on what you mean with "mobile setting"?
I think the devices MeeGo will run on will have at least 256MB rootfs and
several GBs of extra flash.
Could you give some concrete examples of standard packages which had to
be modified to work on such a platform?
Documentation is often in separate optional packages or could be removed by something
like docpurge. The /opt problem could be solved by keeping / on eMMC and symlinking
system files from NAND. Optimizations could be send upstream.
So except for the set of packages, what does really need be modified for a mobile setting?
Right. There is a big tendancy by distributions to bloat their packages to fit all purposes. Let's say, I want to drag in NetworkManager in Ubuntu. It drags in a friggen weather library. There are many circumstances, daemons, features that make no sense on mobile devices and just helps to increase power usage, RAM usage and disk usage. The software and packaging was made for computers that perform like a desktop PC plugged in AC for 4 hours.
As I've stated, I don't like their 'incompatible' stance either due to my experiences with Maemo and getting simple libraries on there. I think we should align, but not marry.
I'm just trying to find out how far we can go without modifying standard packages.
The NetworkManager is a very bad example and often used to point out how messed up Ubuntu is. I hate it, too, and it's the first thing is deinstall on a fresh installation. It's not essential.
However, there are a lot of other packages I can and do remove from the stock desktop distribution without losing much functionality.
For this I do not have to modify any package, but, in the worst case, disable same startup scripts.
So it's more a matter of selecting the right set package for a particular purpose (e.g., Ubuntu desktop vs. server vs. netbook edition) than adapting the packages themselves.
Even if some package is not modular enough for our purpose, I think we could easily
convince the maintainer to split it up into subpackages.
Right. There is a big tendancy by distributions to bloat their packages to fit all purposes. Let's say, I want to drag in NetworkManager in Ubuntu. It drags in a friggen weather library. There are many circumstances, daemons, features that make no sense on mobile devices and just helps to increase power usage, RAM usage and disk usage. The software and packaging was made for computers that perform like a desktop PC plugged in AC for 4 hours.
I'd have thought that this is more likely to happen in a MeeGo world than it ever was with Maemo under Nokia. It's clear that MeeGo is intended to have the sort of flexibility that desktop Linuxes already do to run on different kinds of hardware, and use what's avalilable on each without being completely tied to any one of them.
The history of Maemo so far shows that Nokia have been complete to have one release per device, tie them closely together and make any backward porting efforts a huge struggle at best.
Surely for those of us that want future support for the N900 the MeeGo project is the best hope we've ever had.
Yep, so why doesn't anyone from Nokia want to confirm that it will be running and supported on the n900?
Probably because they're naturally secretive and don't really understand open development. This isn't new though - have they ever confirmed anything in advance?
Yep, so why doesn't anyone from Nokia want to confirm that it will be running and supported on the n900?
Because that's a commitment they don't want to be tied to. Has Apple announced what phones it's new iPhone OS will be supported on? Did Microsoft announce which existing phones could run WM7?
Yep, so why doesn't anyone from Nokia want to confirm that it will be running and supported on the n900?
I think Nokia is waiting for some idealistic volunteers (see Mer) to backport MeeGo to N900
so that they can save money. Only if no critical mass gets together, Nokia will consider doing it itself.
That was the Fremantle -> Harmattan plan. MeeGo actually restores GTK+ as a supported option.
Not really. It just says Qt is the "primary toolkit" and GTK is included "for application compatibility" which doesn't promise all that much more than the "community supported" version that is Harmattan's choice of words.
