Warning: This is not MeeGo [LWN.net]

Warning: This is not MeeGo

Posted Jun 21, 2011 15:05 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

Better update wikipedia, it seems to think Harmattan == Maemo still:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo#Naming

Warning: This is not MeeGo

Posted Jun 21, 2011 15:08 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

Oh, and the Meego article says that N9 uses Meego:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo

(Who you going to believe, some random LWN commenter or Wikipedia? :) )

Warning: This is not MeeGo

Posted Jun 21, 2011 15:22 UTC (Tue) by blitzkrieg3 (guest, #57873) [Link]

arjan is hardly a "random" LWN commenter.

But aside from that, Wikipedia seems to be in agreement:

> Even though MeeGo was initiated as collaboration between Nokia and Intel, the collaboration was formed when Nokia was already developing the next incarnation of its Maemo Linux distribution. As a result, the Maemo 6 base operating system will be kept intact while the Handset UX will be shared, with the name changed to MeeGo/Harmattan

Translation: We're still using Maemo under the hood with a bolted on MeeGo API and UX.

Personally I'm curious how easy it would be to get MeeGo on the device, if the Handset UX truly can be used for both.

Warning: This is not MeeGo

Posted Jun 21, 2011 15:26 UTC (Tue) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link]

Given that the official MeeGo glossary describe Harmattan as future Maemo 6 (now MeeGo handheld) release by Nokia, but goes on to say

It is MeeGo compatible (that is, has a MeeGo API) but is not to be confused with MeeGo 1.0 Handheld as it is NOT based on MeeGo Core.

suggests to me that the nomenclature has gotten out of hand.

Warning: This is not MeeGo

Posted Jun 21, 2011 15:12 UTC (Tue) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (2 responses)

To be fair, http://www.developer.nokia.com/Devices/MeeGo/ is mostly about Qt, Qt and Qt. Still the "MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan" way of wording is not optimal, even though for application developers MeeGo API == Qt API (http://apidocs.meego.com/1.2/) and the same Qt SDK can be used to develop for both MeeGo and Harmattan. The platforms themselves are still as different as eg. Fedora and Mint are.

For application developers, given automatic enough packaging work by the Nokia/MeeGo SDK:s (both using Qt Creator), Harmattan is however quite close to MeeGo 1.2 because it's the same Qt in both. But for LWN readers they are completely different beasts as distributions go. Also if not talking about application developers but platform developers, Harmattan is of course very different and they offer a separate Scratchbox-based (from Maemo times) platform SDK: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Harmattan%3...

Warning: This is not MeeGo

Posted Jun 21, 2011 16:57 UTC (Tue) by ajross (guest, #4563) [Link] (1 responses)

That's not really correct. Harmattan is based on the "MeeGo Touch Framework", which is a very thick layer on top of Qt. MeeGo proper still includes this layer, but it's deprecated and expected to disappear eventually. The UI framework for MeeGo's future is just QML ("Qt Quick"), with a library of common components.

Basically, while MeeGo and Harmattan share roots, UI code can't be meaningfully written to run across the platforms.

Warning: This is not MeeGo

Posted Jun 22, 2011 5:17 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

The applications also for Harmattan are done with Qt Quick and Qt Quick components: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Harmattan:D...

So again from applications (not platform) point of view, it's normal Qt and normal MeeGo.

Warning: This is not MeeGo

Posted Jun 21, 2011 15:23 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (3 responses)

I guess you need to remove the N950 from the MeeGo Community Device Program page then, or at least make it clear that the only way you'd be developing on MeeGo is if you got the N950 running Harmattan, then ported MeeGo Handset to run on it, and removed Harmattan.

You should also probably stop referring to it as MeeGo-Harmattan in meego.com's glossary.

And have a word with the most recent poster on Planet MeeGo (which is displayed on the front page of meego.com), who has just posted an article stating that the N9 runs 'MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan' (sic).

Given these, I'd say that the confusion is fairly understandable ...

-Daniel, who works on neither

MeeGo is also coming to N950/N9 via community

Posted Jun 21, 2011 15:52 UTC (Tue) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (2 responses)

Well as pointed out in the Quim's blog post, there is that that the MeeGo Community Edition (http://wiki.meego.com/N900) will now expand also to N950 and N9 - so it will be possible to run pure MeeGo there as well and that, unlike Harmattan, is pure FLOSS and community based.

That could be interesting for a plenty of LWN readers (those that don't think of a phone as an appliance they have no deeper interest in), of course pending on how much work there is on the driver side. But given that N950 and N9 are OMAP3, there is a good chance that it's off to relatively quick start regarding basic hw functionality. Then it's simply about innovating UX on the open side, a bit like SHR (http://shr-project.org/) has done with E17 for the Neo FreeRunner, but this time focusing on Qt/QML and more awesomeness with a fast/modern hardware (FreeRunner wasn't that even at launch time in 2008).

And for both Harmattan and MeeGo, the choice of application development platform is Qt, so it makes sense for also meego.com to advertise N950 as a MeeGo development device, even if using it with Harmattan. _Most_ developers that the mass media is talking about are application developers, not distribution/system developers like many LWN readers.

MeeGo is also coming to N950/N9 via community

Posted Jun 22, 2011 2:35 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

SHR is for more than just the OpenMoko devices, in fact N900 is among the devices they support. I'd wager they will have N950/N9 support soon after they get their hands on some.

MeeGo is also coming to N950/N9 via community

Posted Jun 22, 2011 5:19 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

Yes, so more like this is about competing with SHR's E17 applications (on top of FSO for phone functionality) with Qt/QML on top of oFono or FSO (the latter is not yet packaged in MeeGo).

Warning: This is not MeeGo

Posted Jun 21, 2011 17:45 UTC (Tue) by Jaffa (guest, #4327) [Link]

With respect Arjan, the Linux Foundation own the "MeeGo" trademark and, according to them, although Harmattan may not be MeeGo Compliant or run on the packages from meego.com OBS, it is something with MeeGo in its name.

Semantics aside, and far more importantly, MeeGo needs two things - both of which can be provided by the N9 and N950:

A mass-market, consumer-friendly device perceived to be running MeeGo, for future OEMs and manufacturers to see that a compelling UX can be built on (something like) MeeGo.
Apps.

The Compliance Specification (for MeeGo 1.1 at least) specifies that "compliant applications must conform to the MeeGo API", and since the "MeeGo API" is very similar to the "Harmattan API", this means a relatively simple porting exercise (although a lot of the Harmattan GUI is MTF rather than QML, QML is still the preferred way to write Harmattan apps, as it is on MeeGo).

There are a couple of issues, of course: packaging, which can be dealt with trivially with metadata in the SDK and OBS; and (more importantly) the toolkit with which you can build consistent QML user interfaces. Basically, there are two for QML: Intel's MeeGo UX Components (developed behind closed doors, thrown over the wall and now open) and Nokia's Qt Quick Components for Symbian and Harmattan (developed in the open, then closed for Harmattan's "big reveal" and now, presumably, about to be re-opened).

At the MeeGo Conference last month the development community was basically told "tough" and that there'd be no common UI toolkit. FLOSS developers with N950s and N9s will want to target both Harmattan and MeeGo if it's easy. It's in everyone's interest to make it so.

So, I expect a further QML component libraries - which abstract the two competing ones - to be developed by Harmattan developers wanting to target MeeGo. Ideally, it would be unnecessary, but it's in MeeGo's interest to foster this: I'll put money on there being more Harmattan apps within a month of people getting N950s than there are currently MeeGo apps.