[maemo-developers] ANNOUNCE: Maemo 5 gets community OS updates

[From: Andrew Flegg]

The Maemo Community Council and Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh are pleased to
announce the launch of the Maemo 5 Community SSU project. It is
currently in a testing and elaboration phase, and your help is
required.

WHAT IS IT?
===========
Seamless Software Update (SSU), is the term Nokia used to brand the
over-the-air updates of Maemo.

Community Seamless Software Update (CSSU) is being developed by the
Maemo community, for the Maemo community. It aims to deliver fixes
which can't be delivered easily through Extras, such as core N900
packages. It won't, however, bundle software which can be installed
through the Extras repositories.

It's got a presence in various Maemo forums:
  * IRC:  #maemo-ssu on FreeNode
  * Bugs: bugs.maemo.org, product: Extras > Maemo 5 Community SSU
  * Wiki: http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU
  * Talk: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=67905

WHO IS IT FOR?
==============
Long-term: all N900 users.
Now: power-users, developers, Nokia/Maemo/MeeGo engineers, testers,
documentation writers and those willing to risk a re-flash in order to
help.

HOW DO I INSTALL IT?
====================
0) Make sure you're running PR1.3, Nokia's last official Maemo 5
   update. To see if you have PR1.3, go into "Settings > About
   product", you should see under "Version" it has the numbers
   beginning with "20.2010.36".
1) Go to http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU using your N900 browser.
2) Click on the "Install" arrow next to "Testing"
3) Hildon Application Manager (HAM) will launch and will prompt
   you with a series of messages and warnings. Click continue
   and let it install the community package.
4) Once done, close HAM and go into the applications menu.
   Look for, and launch, for "Community SSU". This will then
   automatically run through a series of scripts to ensure HAM
   will now be using community repository for updates.
5) HAM will re-open and present a system upgrade called "Maemo 5
   Community SSU". Once installed, your device will reboot.

These instructions are also in the wiki:

    http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU#Installation

HOW CAN I HELP?
===============
Can you write documentation? If so, it'd be great to flesh out the
wiki page with installation instructions (to make it easy for users to
install without worrying about missing a step or getting it wrong);
explain more about the SSU and generally spruce up the wiki page and
maintain things like the changelogs etc.

Were you involved in developing Maemo? If so, with Nokia now looking
to Harmattan and MeeGo, we'd love to see your itches addressed in the
Community SSU (CSSU). Have you always wanted to implement something in
hildon-desktop, but Management stood in your way? We'd love to have
it!

Have you written a patch for Maemo? Raise a bug and let's get it in the CSSU.

Are you a developer? There are numerous patches floating around for
hildon-desktop; but they can't be included in the CSSU until they are
configurable (via gconf) and default to off.

Want to test? Not only testing this release, but writing test scripts
so that each release of the CSSU can get sanity checked before
unleashing it into a "stable" repo for end-users. How do we do it?
What should be tested? How is it organised?

Want to organise? There's still lots of process left to organise;
hopefully there'll be bugs and features to triage and manage in
bugs.maemo.org as well as communication of the testing, releases and
end-user readiness of the CSSU.



-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council member