[maemo-developers] Building Maemo OS from Source.

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Mar 22, 2010, at 1:53 PM, Marius Vollmer wrote:

> ext Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah at jeremiahfoster.com> writes:
> 
>> On Mar 22, 2010, at 7:47 AM, Marius Vollmer wrote:
>> 
>>> In my view, MeeGo is a development effort, not a standardization
>>> effort.
>> 
>> I am not convinced that this is true. It looks like MeeGo is going to
>> track upstream closely with few customizations. It is going be be more
>> of an integration that a distribution. In that regards, it leans
>> closer to a "standard linux instance" than it does a separate distro.
> 
> Hmm, still, MeeGo is surely going to be a collection of software that is
> maintained, released, and distributed.  There will be documents about
> it, but the primary product of the joint Intel/Nokia effort is surely
> going to be mostly software, and not PDFs or--deity beware--PowerPoints
> and a certification process.  Or did I really understand things wrong?

:-)

No - surely you are right. But I think it is going to proceed from the notion that it is not quite a full distro.

>>> Thus, MeeGo lives next to Fedora and Ubuntu, and remixes much of the
>>> same software in a slightly different way.  It is not in the same
>>> category as POSIX, LSB, and FHS.
>> 
>> The value it will have though is as a building block - not as a
>> finished distro like Fedora or Ubuntu.
> 
> I think it is important that MeeGo is a viable OS on its own, to attract
> more people.

Definitely. But the feeling I get is that they want to minimize the (perhaps inevitable) distro politics. Free Software without the Free Software process. ;)

>  The content draft says that it will: it goes all the way
> up to a graphical desktop environment, including a few applications, and
> maybe even a browser.

Yeah, and this is where I am getting confused. Because it looks like an almost complete distro, but some of the Moblin devs seem to imply, or even say outright, that they don't want to be a full distro but rather a sort of super middleware. I don't really see powerusers caring that much about middleware.
> 
> If I become interested in MeeGo, and the first thing I have to do is to
> decide which of the many vendor versions to actually use to get
> something useful, I might already be put off.

I think your specific needs will determine which vendor or middleware version. If you're going to build a set-top box, take the TV MeeGo version, if you're doing IVI use MeeGo IVI, if you're doing embedded on ARM, take MeeGo ARM Vanilla. I assume that is the vision anyway.

Jeremiah