2012-02-16: Bye bye MeeGo:  I replaced the broken boot with Joli OS, cloud based application platform. No Tizen HTML5 available yet.

2011-12-11: Warning update:  Nokia has dropped MeeGo and in September 2011 Intel did the same. The MeeGo 1.2 is the last MeeGo available, unless the community take over. So follow the below instructions only if you know what you want to do. (but it still works fine for me).

Original article:
MeeGo 1.1 is out since a couple of months now. I got bored during the holidays and decided to sacrifice a rainy day to see what it is all about.

My motivation was two folded. First, I was tired of the original Windows 7 “Starter“, the original installation on my netbook which I have bought from my French network operator. It really sucks, too big OS for such as small machine. Second reason was a simply curiosity of what can be the base OS of my future smart phone (who said “Nokia”?).

Conclusion

Was it worth of it? Yes. Definitely, my netbook has a new life and I can do much more things with it. Don’t expect to get out of it without some headache but the installation is pretty easy, but with some usual specific “features” which I will explain below.

Market analysis

Will MeeGo and MeeGo powered devices make it against the iOS and Android? Of course, as a pure operating system (Linux) and as a distro (MeeGo) has nothing to be ashamed when compared to the two commercially successful big brothers. It is very convenient to use, quite stable (but not yet stable enough) but as a experienced Linux user I can still feel the disguised Gnome behind the multi-menu drop-down toolbar. Compared to iOS it can have some technological edge but it will never reach the smoothness of the Apple’s products. And there are so many hiccups which require opening of the command line prompt (the feature which I greatly appreciate) that I am not all surprised to hear that Nokia will come up with a MeeGo powered product only in 2011, if they can make it. They have so much work on this platform to make it simply reliable, easy to use and to make sure it integrates easily with Ovi.com services that one year is short time for all that work. And Nokia knows as well as everyone over here that it will not be any Apple killer machine.

Let’s face it, marketing hype is more important than the actual usability. If we take the upcoming, Ubuntu powered tablet computers they will never make it against iPad, marketing wise. Not that they would be worse to use. They would not just appear sexy to the grand public. It is so much cooler to own a shiny iPad, or iPhone than any of the Chinese, Taiwanese or whatsoever Nokia tablets. Apart of the geek like me, who cares about the Ubuntu, MeeGo, Linux or the OS name in general? All that matters is the coolness.

You cannot believe how much of doctorat level people I have met explaining me with their eyes shining how they can send photo attachments to their parents directly from where it happens and how great it is that their parents would be able to answer them the same way (they never do). Yawn. But it is precisely the grand public and the media who eat the pill and amplifies  the hype. How you can imagine that MeeGo, Ubuntu or any other open source software could do that?

Installation of MeeGo on Samsung N150

When I got the netbook, it auto-installs Win 7 Starter. I wisely selected to split the big hard disk in two data partitions, C: and D: instead of the usual C: only installation. I was thinking already that I can use the D: partition for some Linux hack. If you haven’t done the same, the C: can be resized during the installation, if you like to keep the Win7 for dual boot, like I did. But in case, it is perhaps worthwhile to use Samsung’s Recovery tool to take a full backup image of your system and put than on a (big) external USB disk or such. If you just hit through the installation brainlessly, you would end up to remove all the partitions of the original installation, including the Recovery partition. Therefore, if you want to make it sure, you would be better to make also a boot disk for your Samsung Recovery file. And perhaps even test that it actually boots.. Well, I didn’t, but you have been warned.

Get and boot MeeGo 1.1 installing image

I installed the MeeGo version with Google Chrome. You need a minimum 1GB USB stick to sacrifice. Follow the MeeGo Windows installation instructions how to make a bootable MeeGo installation image USB stick. If you have that infamous D: disk which you can sacrifice, it is now a good idea to right click on the My Computer icon and select “Manage”. Go to the disk management, find out the partition for D: and remove it. There is no space on the disk to install MeeGo without messing with the Windows installation. If there is no D:, the C: “disk’s” partition must be resized, and there is always a risk. Or what the heck, you can decide to remove the Windows altogether, what do I care …

Shutdown the system, put the MeeGo USB disk in a USB port and power the thing up. When the system starts up, when you still see but a black screen, repeatedly and steadily hit the F2 on your keyboard to get into the BIOS setup.

The picture above is perhaps not what you will you see, you would have just the splash screen of Samsung. I have selected in my machine to show more information at BIOS boot time, the Linux way (because we are geeks, we want cryptic messages flowing around all day long).

Once in BIOS, you need to make a few changes. The first thing is the boot order, the first device must be the bootable USB disk. Remember that it must be inserted at boot time in order it to shown in the boot device menu (click the image for full size screenshot).

While in the boot menu, you may want to change the screen brightness into the maximum, for your convenience. Use the Fn key and the up arrow key for that. Oh, because the brightness adjustment does not work with MeeGo 1.1 on this computer. You can only change the screen brightness once in the BIOS. There is the following setting you should use for that in the Boot section:

Still in BIOS settings, you may want to check the below wake-up setting for the opening of the lid, in the Advanced section. Otherwise it might happen that your system will not wake up when you put it in sleep by closing the lid. There is another modification related to this problem, explained below but it can be done only after the installation, please read further.

Save your changes by pressing F10. The system will boot from the USB disk. You should see the MeeGo installation disk’s boot menu.

It is now a good idea to boot on the MeeGo’s Live Image, which is on the same image. This way you can verify that MeeGo will actually work in your system, you can play around with it a little and in general, you can decide do you really want to install it. If you still want it, reboot the system and this time select the installation.

You should see MeeGo’s Anaconda installer’s splash screen.

Click the arrow on the lower left corner and start the installation. After going through the usual language and keyboard selections (I selected US International as keyboard even if my machine has a French keyboard, you can swap between the keyboard layouts after the installation) you would get the crucial question about the partitioning. You have two possibilities. If you have managed to leave an empty space in your disk, like I did by removing the D: “disk’s” partition your selection is the following (make sure to check the Review layout check box):

If you don’t have the space, you can take the risk of resizing the C: “disk’s” partition. There is not much to loose. Except your Windows 7 installation and only you can estimate how valuable it is for you. Anyway, if everything fails, you can restart the installation and select the “Remove all partitions on selected drives and create default layout”. That would make at least a clean installation and you do not have to wonder with the below explanations about the dual booting.

What you should get as partition layout on Samsung N150 is something like this:

Sorry no bigger image available

In other words, Samsung Recovery system is on the first primary partition (1), the Windows 7 boots from the second primary partition (2), the C: “disk” is on the third primary partition (3). The fourth primary partition (4) is further split to extended partition layout by the MeeGo Anaconda installer (btw. used in Red Hat, makes pretty good job with partition tables). First extended partition (5) is the /boot mount. “extlinux” boot loader is used. Second extended partition (6) is / (root) mount partition. You may notice that the file system is btrfs. It means that your home directory can be crypted, there is a selection for that. This will lead to a known bug that the applications you have used will never get registered as used. It is Ok, you will just see “this application has never been launched” under the icons, not a big deal. Go ahead, accept the “btrfs”. The last extended partition (7) is the swap partition. Oh, yes, extlinux boot loader can boot on an extended partition. We are  in 2011 soon.

You should be ready to boot. You’ll get into the MeeGo quickly enough. No hint on the Windows boot? Don’t panic, that’ll be explained in the below section.

Changing boot menu for the dual boot

Once you have been tired of the wonderful world of the MeeGo and would like to get back to Bill’s, you need to do the following in order to activate the dual boot option, which is there but hidden from you:

In the Application’s, find the command line prompt to open a console. If you are not familiar with “vi” editor, you can use “gedit” editor alright. Make yourself as root by issuing a command “su -” (no I do not like to type all the time “sudo”, I think that real system administrators should work as “root”; If you edit the boot menu file, you should understand your responsabilities anyway, using “sudo” does not protect you from your own mistakes). Ok, type now  ”su -” and use your own password as “root” user password, that’s the way MeeGo sets it.

vi /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf

Make sure that you make the following changes

...
timeout 30
...
# menu hidden
...
append ro root=/dev/sda6 quiet vga=current nohz=off highres=off
label win7
     menu label Win 7
     kernel chain.c32
     append boot 2
label RestoreWin
     menu label RestoreWin
     kernel chain.c32
     append boot 1

The “30″ is actually 3 seconds, you may want to change to that to your own taste. The “nohz=..” stuff is a kernel option which is required to overcome the bug of MeeGo never waking up on Samsung N150 once the timeout of a idling system puts it in sleep. The actual boot menu now looks something like the below screenshot:

Dual Boot Menu - no bigger picture available

Last but not least, do not forget that the partition “1″ is to boot the Samsung Recovery system. If you ever go there, the first thing Samsung Recovery system will do is to restore the MBR with its own, Windows boot loader. No way back to MeeGo after that (I will explain how to recover from that situation below).

How to synchronize with Ovi.com

The out of the box MeeGo 1.1 will not work with Ovi.com. You need to get from the http://repo.meego.com the SyncML packages from the trunk. I got

buteo-syncml-0.4.9.52-1.2.i589

(and the equivalent buteo-syncml-devel package).

I created a new device on Ovi.com, when it sends the SMS, there appears a link “manual settings”.  I followed the instructions and got the Ovi.com synchronization working with the MeeGo Sync utility. But it is all useless, since e-mail addresses in Contacts did not get sync’ed correctly! I dropped it and used Google Chrome on Ovi.com, it is much more interesting way of doing it, especially since I am already synchronizing Ovi.com with my phone, which is synchronized from my corporate Exchange server, … To many syncs will kill the sync.

How to get the MeeGo boot back if Windows overwrites it

Simply boot back to the MeeGo USB Live Disk and launch it (and not the installation). Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get a command prompt. The root password seems to be “meego”…

Now mount the root file system of your installed MeeGo system, remember it is on the partition (6).

mount /dev/sda6 /mnt

Install the extlinux (syslinux) bootloader in the MBR of the disk.

cd /usr/share/syslinux
cat mbr.bin > /dev/sda

Reboot and test

init 6

Problems

I have lost the DNS (name services, which are strangely served by the “localhost” 127.0.0.1) and quite often the wireless network connection. But otherwise, there was no problem with the network installation in general, which is a good thing. I have somehow managed to block the entire system (perhaps X11 or Gnome) by doing something on Google Chrome. The way out of this is either to reboot. Otherwise you can do the good old run-state recycling, just to see if this is System V compatible installation: hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 and login as “root” (your password):

init 3

(wait)

init 5

Conclusion #2

I hope you have enjoyed with your MeeGo installation as much I do. Hopefully you have avoided some pitfalls with these instructions. Let’s see, there will be a MeeGo phone out for next Xmas, right ? ….

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