14 DAY TRIAL // Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia and leading chip maker Intel announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that they merged their Maemo and Mobling mobile operating systems into a new platform, called MeeGo, which comes with support for smartphones and other mobile devices. The first handsets powered by the new OS are still many months away, yet the two companies are already working on the transition from Moblin and Maemo, and say they expect for the MeeGo repository to be opened by the end of March.
“The most important question is of course about the code. We hope to move on here very quickly now. Nokia and Intel have set the target to open the MeeGo repository by the end of this month. I guess this is something that finally will signify the real 'Day One' of MeeGo project, a genuine merger of moblin and maemo. What is scheduled to be available then is the first and very raw baseline to a source and binary repository to build MeeGo trunk on Intel ATOM boards and Nokia N900,” Valtteri Halla notes in a recent post on meego.com.
One of the most interesting aspects of this move is the inclusion of Nokia 900 in the equation. Nokia has delivered the device on the market in late 2009, with the Maemo 5 operating system on board, and announced that we should also see a Maemo 6-based handset delivered to the market in 2010. However, in case MeeGo replaces this plan, the public availability of the MeeGo repository will offer existing N900 owners the possibility to try something new on their devices. But when it comes to developers, the technology behind MeeGo is of a greater importance, that's for sure.
“While code is certainly the most important question, the most frequently asked, however, has been about technology selections. The big ticket items like Qt, OBS and RPM were already communicated at the launch […] Once we just get going the objective is to have all of the MeeGo platform work fully in public. During the last few years both Nokia and Intel have learned that the success of moblin and maemo R&D mode fundamentally comes from the Open Source way of openness and MeeGo is a huge further commitment on this path. MeeGo will be a complete yet not entirely productised Linux distribution, it is fully Open Source in code and in process,” the post continues.