News from the Maemo weekend in Copenhagen; Canonical will switch to Maemo-derivative Mer from the Moblin 1.0 build for it’s Ubuntu MID derivative. Moblin 2.0 is no longer MID-focused so it looks like Intel have just lost a significant partner in their MID ecosystem.
From a Ubuntu Wiki page: “Ubuntu MID Edition is now based on Mer, and has been optimised to an even greater degree for small screens, slower processors, and low-memory environments…With the sunset of Moblin 1.0, the previous upstream for MID is dead. The Mer community is active, and actively engaged with Ubuntu, so the flavour is more likely to be kept up-to-date and of interest to users. inch
Mer is currently focusing on building for ARM platforms but that doesn’t mean that Ubuntu will keep the same focus. I expect to see both X86 and ARM build from Ubuntu which in itself is very significant. This is also a great boost for the Mer project team.
There’s an obvious question to ask though. If Maemo is open-source, why Mer?
Mer presents itself as an Open Source project that isn’t restricted to a fixed set of hardware:
Maemo is open source and mature enough to be a strong player in the race to be the platform
developers target and hw vendors use. Many have tried to adapt Hildon
(Debian, Moblin, Ubuntu Mobile) but have hit the wall that the Maemo platform is
closely tied to the Nokia Internet Tablets. That has to be changed multiple
platforms, one platform, app for one device, app benefits all devices.
(The Mer presentation is available here as a PDF link)
We’ll have to wait to see how this pans out but it looks like we might have a Mer build for Ubuntu 9.10 which could be a real boost for MID and ultra mobile PC users that were waiting for Moblin 2.0 and with Maemo and Mer, Nokia and Canonical supporting the projects, it presents a new opportunity for developers in the MID and ultra mobile PC space.
Via Maemo member, Quim Gil’s Twitter stream.
Ubuntu-MID to switch from Moblin to Mer. #mozmae Did Intel just lose a big partner in their MID ecosystem? http://cli.gs/dQQ7BA
GR: Ubuntu-MID to switch from Moblin to Mer. http://bit.ly/17efKl
re: Mer is currently focusing on building for ARM platforms
Mer uses Suse’s superb (GPL) openbuild service to support a number of architectures; multiple armel variants, ppc and even more obscure ones like i386 :)
i386, strange choice ;-)
But the focus appears to be on ARM as far as I can tell so far. Developers are using N800, N810 etc.
Are you saying that both Canonical and Mer will be outputing seperate distro’s? I hope not for the customers sake.
Steve
Mer is targeting more than just Nokia tablets. They include in their scope also delivering for x86 systems, and non-Nokia ARM systems. For example, there’s a lot of activity on the Moses Q5 (over at internettablettalk.com/forums … now talk.maemo.org’s forms … in the Competitors section, there’s a thread on the Q5 which is talking about Mer on the Q5 and Q7). They’re also targeting things like the Beagle Board (making the Always Inovating Touchbook a likely place to run it).
I don’t know if that means Canonical and Mer are going to go in separate directions or not… I agree that it would best if they both worked hand in hand on both platforms (there’s no reason for Ubuntu-MID to JUST be an ARM platform, it could be for all MIDs). We’ll just have to wait and see.
Is it possible to install it on Smart Q7?
Mer for the Q7 is being worked on I understand. There are already test images available for the Q5 which uses the same hardware.
It works on the Q5, but there’s some issues for it on the Q7 … and they’re working on it.
Any news about Mer for Q7?
@corticalsam
In general pop over to #mer on freenode
see : http://wiki.maemo.org/IRC to use the webclient.
There’s a Q7 conversation happening as I type; if you want to help get it working then you have to get involved :D
mer itself uses an ubuntu upstream base so it sounds like canonical wants to use the own artwork and final polish on mer
in response to the question why not maemo it’s becuase maemo isn’t fully open source. maemo has a strong open source base but the final user interaction layer doesn’t have source available. mer was founded for this very reason. mer’s aim is to be a fully open source maemo replacment on nokia’s internet tablets and a finger friendly mobile OS for other devices.
It’s “its Ubuntu MID derivative” by the way. ;)
I guess everyone’s working on the assumption that Moblin won’t be (re)targeted for MIDs in any reasonable time scale. (They should have released something usable *last year* to get some momentum anyway.)
I think an OS ought to have a foundation that is based upon states that applications can be aware of and adapt to.
The device is in my pocket and locked. So it is in a sleep state, most applications do little to nothing except services (music player, file downloading, etc), event listeners for network events (phone calls, messages, etc).
I have the device out, unlocked and am using it. So it is in an active mobile state similar to the sleep state in that services run in the background if I want them to (music player, file downloading, etc), but one application is active and owns the interface.
I dock my device, which is connected to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, ac adapter. So it would be in a desktop state. Applications would behave a lot differently, they would share the display, have better interfaces, run simultaneously. The system could perform at it’s most optimal as it doesn’t have to conserve battery.
Having network states would also be very useful. When connected to your work or home network, all applications would behave normally, but when connected to a public network maybe you don’t your applications to send your private information across that network, and another state would be bandwidth limited connection (if you are on a connection where you pay by the megabyte), so maybe the OS and applications won’t do updates.
Having application change OS states would be useful, for example games could put the OS into a game console state and sleep the other applications so that the game isn’t interrupted and has smooth performance.
Windows Vista has been the worst about these kinds of things, I’ve had Vista automatically download an update and restart the computer while I was playing a game (I thought my computer crashed, until I saw the “installing updates”). I’ve had it do indexing while I was streaming a video off my hard drive (which was causing stuttering in the video, as my hard drive was over loading :P). I’ve heard users complain about going over their 5GB cap on their mobile broadband internet because of a windows and applications update while they are connected. You can configure windows to not do all this stuff but it’s not something users know or think about until they have to, and since there are no OS states, you have to manually set up your system when you want these things or not want these things.
Anyone who wants to try Mer in a virtual machine on the PC can do so if you get Sun’s VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads), download the Mer x86 image (http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Releases/0.13), and follow these instructions : http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Documentation/Installation#Installation_in_VirtualBox
The only thing I noticed is that installing the VirtualBox extas broke it, so I started over again and skipped installing the extras. You can try it if you want to but be sure to keep the original images zip file around so you can revert back to it.
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