Mer picks up the idea of MeeGo Core, and provides a very stripped down, mobile devices oriented Linux distribution. But this distribution is vendor oriented. Not end-user oriented. Mer’s goal is to provide a base that vendors can build on and create end-user oriented products.

There are two kinds of vendors. Ones providing a “hardware adaptation” and ones providing “user experience”.

Hardware adaptation lies below Mer, and makes Mer run on a specific hardware. Let it be an Intel CPU based PC or Netbook or an ARM SoC based mobile device or any other esoteric hardware.

User Experience vendor provides a layer on top of Mer, interacting with a live human user. This may be the MeeGo Tablet UX, MeeGo Netbook UX, Plasma Active, Cordia HD, MeeGo IVI or any other User Interface.

This allows for many combinations and decouples the effort. Of course you can be both hardware adaptation and user experience vendor, building a complete Product.

Have fun in the spirit of openness.

Mer – What is it all about? ©, .

I haven’t plan to run an unconference session, but I thought that I would share my recent experience in porting MeeGo to Qualcomm Snapdragon platform (Dell Streak hardware). It turned out fun – I talked over an hour, had give people many pointers how to start their own port and answered many, many, many questions. All after sleeping for 3,5h. after playing Werewolf up to 3 in the night.

Thank you Linux Foundation for launching such a great event and you all the people I met for the experience.

P.S. You may see me in the center of attention on the picture in Dawn’s post.

MeeGo Conference ©, .

1st & 3rd place ©, .

N900 is not really fitted as a game console. Arcade games are horrible to play without using PS3 DS controller.
So for now I am more interested in porting and improving ports of mouse (touch screen) based games: Widelands, Bos Wars, Freeciv, LinCity, etc. as this is what I play while commuting to work. (N900 resistive screen with stylus is perfect for that).
Since most emulated games are arcade ones, I have less interest in improving emulators. With one exception – I do like to play Tekken3 on TV using dualshock.

I guess this is general point missed by most non-coder community members of all open source based communities.
We (mostly) do not code, port and hack software because we like the process (it’s tedious and mostly boring), we want to make world better (well… maybe the closest one), or seek community appraisal. We do this to fulfill our own needs. To scratch the itch.
I ported PCSX and PSX4ALL because I love Tekken3. I ported E-UAE and UAE4ALL because I wanted to watch SOTA whenever I want. I ported Widelands because I loved to play Settlers and still love it. Etc. etc.

So yes. If I would buy Pandora this would naturally incline me to work on software for it.
But since I already own N900 I do not really want to spend money on another gadget which I may or may not find use for.

But since it’s the same hardware and software basically, you may enjoy my improvements on Pandora and I may enjoy Pandora improvements on N900.
It’s pity though that GP2X and Pandora developers do not share the habit of sharing the (even GPLed) source alongside with binaries, like we Linux folks do and we (maemo people) need to resort to begging GP2X/Pandora devs for the sources.

My view on Pandora and GP2X development ©, .

The new concept for the emulator fully utilizes Maemo osso-games-startup frontend with standalone CLI psx4m worker binary.
And the first part of this combo is out: http://maemo.org/packages/view/psx4m/

PSX4M is finally out ©, .

My answer is:

Simple answer: Never.

Longer answer:
N900 and its Maemo5 operating system is already abandoned by Nokia and is pretty much dead.
Next device from Nokia, will have Maemo6 operating system which is:
a) very different from Maemo5
b) a dead-end of Maemo operating systems, because we already know it will be discontinued in favor of MeeGo

So… None in the right mind would start developing an application for already dead Maemo5.
And none in the right mind would start developing an application for Maemo6, knowing that it’s targeted for death right after seeing the daylight.

They say that we should start developing applications for MeeGo, but no one knows how, because specification is work-in-progress and kept secret.

For me the answer is simple – move to Android.
I ordered Motorola Milestone yesterday.

Harmattan R.I.P. ©, .

POWDER – roguelike from GBA to Maemo ©, .

OpenDUNE for Maemo ©, .

The package is available from github, because the extras builder is broken.

Globulation 2 Maemo Edition ©, .

N900 hardware QEMU emulator ©, .