As many people will know I’ve spent around 18 months of my spare time packaging and building the Netbook UX for Moblin/MeeGo on openSUSE. Not on my own, but with a community around me. I would just like to say a huge thank you to that community, you’ve been great and spurred me on when I felt like the whole world was conspiring against me. Sound a bit morose? Well in a way it is.
I’ve been stewing over a response on the MeeGo developers mailing list for some time now. Basically the MeeGo Project and their steward, the Linux Foundation don’t seem to be wanting to play this whole open source, open community game. I wouldn’t have any issue with it if it was just Nokia and Intel fumbling with MeeGo, it would be just another lost opportunity that big corporations screwed up on. Problem is the Linux Foundation is involved and are supposedly the ones guiding the project.
Looks like it’s been a while since I mentioned anything about our dear friend Smeegol – sorry. As most will know MeeGo made a couple of releases: 1.0.5 mostly an update to their original release 1.1.0 the new release with new API, and renaming most packages So where is Smeegol? Well we’re pretty much there, although not 100%. I have 1.0.5 all built and packaged including an image. Problem is I seem to have hit a bug with network-manager-netbook – it doesn’t seem to be displaying networks which is a fairly fundamental issue :-(
I unfortunately received an e-mail just now from the Linux Foundation with regards to our precious Smeegol, and it appears on the face of it that they’re not that impressed with our efforts. Somewhat bizarrely as they have had plenty of opportunity to respond. Now I’m not going to start ranting and raving about injustice etc, what I will say is this and it is a bit of a rant ;-) :
So after many months of hard work, Smeegol is out the door. Now contrary to what some folk may think, this was *NOT* a one man show – far from it! I may have spearheaded the whole affair, but I in no way can take credit for it all – that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t accept any of your fine donations ;-) I’d like to take this opportunity to thank many of the people that helped get this labour of love out the door.
I thought I should let anyone that cares know what the latest status of my work is. What work? Getting MeeGo on openSUSE, of course! I’m calling it Smeegol – SUSE MeeGo Linux, and this just happens to be the Teal Goblin – Teal is the code name for 11.3 ;-) Well I’m not quite there yet (unfortunately) :-( I have one major issue which is the Network Panel not displaying properly, and as such is difficult to use.
I thought it was about time that I enlightened people as to what the state of play is with my efforts of getting MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks on openSUSE. The good news is I think I’m pretty much there :-) I believe all the essential packages are built now, although there is a *lot* of work to be done in getting the packages into Factory. The outstanding work is mostly spec file housekeeping but non the less it will be a relatively laborious task.
It’s been a while since I mentioned anything about Goblin and anything netbook related, sorry. Anyhow as everyone is aware, Moblin has since been superseded by MeeGo. The timing was a bit of a PITA for me, as it coincided with the Factory freeze, which means I couldn’t update the relevant packages etc in-time for 11.3. As it stands, 11.3 should have an almost fully functional Moblin environment – I say ‘almost’ as there were two packages that I just couldn’t get to co-operate and build (the modified Moblin browser, and the Web panel).