Some Food for Thought

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Surfing on the web is often a fun way to kill time. However on occasion you do hit some gems. And in this case some gems about the economy and the future!

MeeGo 1.0 and Maemo5 PR 1.2 Released

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While I was busy with the randomness of life, awesomeness hit the world of mobile Linux.

Maemo5 PR 1.2 Released

For all you proud owners of Nokia N900s, go and upgrade to the recently released PR 1.2 update for Maemo5.  This update really, really improved the performance of the phone.  Better multimedia playback, faster browsing experience and many other improvements.

I went the way of reflashing the device, using Nokia’s Updater.  Now it claimed that it would wipe out my personal data on the device.  So I made a backup and let the Updater do its thing.  I went the Windows route, because I didn’t feel like messing with the Linux flasher.  Both work the same, I just went with the easiest route.  To my surprise and delight, all my data carried over.  I needed to reboot the N900 before everything showed up.  But it was all there with the exception of my applications.  That required me to go and re-download and reinstall all my apps.  Not a big deal, but a slight hassle nonetheless.

What about MeeGo?

One thing that didn’t happen was an update to MeeGo for the N900s.  On one hand I understand why Nokia didn’t want to push-out a risky upgrade to existing N900s. On the other, never getting official support for MeeGo on the N900 is a shame.  Developers will get to play with MeeGo images for the N900.  But don’t expect Ovi or anything non-community based finding its way on the MeeGo for Handhelds, in terms of anything for the N900.

MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks

Even if MeeGo never arrives officially on the N900, it is ready to hit the netbook.  The MeeGo project recently released MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks.  Being the ever curious geek, I decided to download and install the MeeGo 1.0 image on a USB stick.  Since the netbook at home is currently on the other side of the pond, I decided to try it out on my non-portable super-netbook (a.k.a. desktop workstation). Unfortunately I got as far setting up and booting off the USB stick.  Then I got a funky framebuffer not found message, and the poor thing tried to start up a display.  I guess no playing around with MeeGo, if it isn’t a supported netbook just yet.

However Nixternal (of KDE/Kubuntu fame) had a better go and blogged about his good impressions of MeeGo.  So far people are impressed.  The MeeGo platform will impact the netbook and tablet market, at least with the products showcased at Computex.  Also it looks like DeviceVM will make their next SplashTop product on top of MeeGo.