Two for the price of one

The first and the last MeeGo phone from Nokia (?), the awesome N9 has been published (without a price and date, but with specs and with a UI developer’s guide).

What might Nokia think about the investors’ intellectual capabilities when they made this early announcement?

I don’t care, personally I want one ! Just to play with its MeeGo like this.

Gorgeous candy stack

 

Set Sail for Open Source – OpenCPN on MeeGo opens new possibilities

I wanted to install OpenCPN (a maritime chart plotter and GPS navigation software) on my MeeGo 1.1 running on my Samsung N150 notebook instead of using the easier path of using a M$ box or even using Ubuntu. Too easy for me, as usual I prefer challenges – but I have also something else in my mind.  Tablet computers would be ideal for heavy sea conditions, provided that some rugged models will pop up as I expect. Certainly some nice applications will appear in A-store but not for me, thank you. If I go overseas, I want to know everything in my ship, including the navigation system. No way to have dependencies to Mr. G. or Mr. J. in my vessel, for sure. MeeGo is designed for small handheld devices so why not test if one can run OpenCPN on it, as an initial test to see if it can be used on a Linux powered tablet computer (why not on a tablet powered by Ubuntu – that exists – but I believe MeeGo approach of netbook being the highest platform range being more appropriate to what I am looking for).

The installation of OpenCPN on MeeGo took me some four hours but then I moved instantly from the rainy Provence to the sunny waters of Virgin Islands hacking the N95 GPS over a Bluetooth connection ! Of course, I would not take this installation in my boat, but now I know that my (future) overseas boat can navigate with the traditional methods and some common sense, with some very helpful aide provided by an open source running tablet computer.

Some words about the OpenCPN MeeGo port (or hack) – head down and no notes, I must admit. First I installed xf86-video-intel-2.12.0 from source of intellinuxgraphics.org (to get some libraries for GTK, the version 2.12 was a conclusion of trial-and-error method). wxWidgets-2.9.1 was the next installation from the source. The /etc/ld.so.conf.d needs to be modified for /usr/local/lib shared libraries. All other dependencies can be found from the MeeGo repositories during the process using zypper search.

OpenCPM-2.3.1 uses cmake. Some errors appear in the gpxdocument.cpp compilation, but they are simple cast problems, which can be resolved by writing, for example, instead of

if (name && name.Lenght() > 0)
if (name!=(const char *)NULL && name.Len() > 0)

There was also a run-time error, a segmentation fault in wxWidgets, but with gdb I quickly spotted that by putting the following statement in comments in chart1.cpp, the welcome dialog still looks good but the crash goes away…

//mldg.CentreOnParent();

Brilliant. Really good job Captain of the Bigdumboat, thanks a bunch for your help to me keep my dream alive!

 

MeeGo 1.1 on Samsung N150 Netbook

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).

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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