LWN: Comments on "Mer: Remastering Maemo"

Mer: Remastering Maemo

Jaffa — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:25:06 +0000

Errata:

Although the present system makes heavy use of the Hildon application toolkit developed for Maemo tablets, Munk says to expect GTK+ and Qt support as well.

Hildon is based on GTK+, and Qt works as well (see screenshot of Qt-based Shopper).

Mer currently uses its own package repositories for the base system, but the tablet builds should be compatible with standard Maemo .ipkg packages.

The base packages come from the Ubuntu Jaunty ARM port, and - as has been noted in a comment above - Maemo and Mer both use .deb packages.

Mer: Remastering Maemo

DeletedUser32991 — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:16:09 +0000

This is great. Imagine Mer/i386 working in a chroot created with debootstrap or even cross-bootstrapping armel and running something that is qemu of recent Debian with the n800 patches that have been floating around...
But already now, Mer is quite an achievement by both in terms of Maemo maturing and pulling of Mer itself.
Back with early chinook versions I tried to close build-dependencies and failed, so I can doubly appreciate Mer. Way to go!

standard Maemo .ipkg packages.

dufkaf — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:27:08 +0000

Maemo does not use .ipkg packages, it uses .deb packages (armel architecture) and device has both dpkg and apt command line tools for package management with additional 'Application Manager' GUI on top of that.