A look at Mer [LWN.net]

A look at Mer

Posted Jul 30, 2013 6:18 UTC (Tue) by jeff@uclinux.org (guest, #8024)
Parent article: A look at Mer

"What is Mer?"

After reading this, I have less of an idea than I had before. I thought it was a graphics server/layer...

"The Mer core has a "whole load of stuff" in it, but it is really just the minimal set of packages to get Qt running."

What does that mean? Anyone can run Qt on a frame buffer in an afternoon, without a graphics server. Embedded systems (you mentioned fridges) are not about "packages", generally. Finally, graphics servers that are tied to a widgets kit kind of miss the point.

So... what is Mer again?

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A look at Mer

Posted Jul 30, 2013 6:22 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

I am pretty sure you are confusing between Mir and Mer. Mer is a fork of Meego. Mir is a alternative to Wayland.

A look at Mer

Posted Jul 30, 2013 11:16 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (1 responses)

Just to elaborate on your (100% correct) statement:

- Mir is an alternative to Weyland, a graphics layer; both intend to substitute X11R7's graphics layer as the default; Mir is a canonical.com project while Weyland is a x.org project.

- Mer is a fork of MeeGo; both are (semi-?)complete distro/stacks for smartphones; the history goes like "once upon a time there was Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo but they got married and became MeeGo; but Nokia got in bed with Microsoft and Maemo became Harmattan but now she wants to be called Maemo again, MeeGo became Tizen and went to Samsung, and the community forked it into Mer."

A look at Mer

Posted Aug 4, 2013 19:14 UTC (Sun) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]

Just wanted to add that Mer is older than MeeGo. When MeeGo appeared Mer developers kind of "suspended" the project to converge on MeeGo, but with the end of the project, Mer was "resumed".

NOTE: I have no inside information about this. It's just what I remember of reading about.