The Alpha is an architecture that will be around for the next 20 years
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Meego releases a netbook edition
MOBILE LINUX DISTRIBUTION Meego is now available for netbooks, putting more pressure on Microsoft.
The hook-up between Intel's Moblin operating system and Nokia's Maemo was announced at Mobile World Congress in February, and finally the fruit of their labours is available to netbook users. According to the release notes, a number of netbooks are already fully supported. Given that Meego is open source and based on Linux, hardware support is likely to grow quickly.
Meego is facing stiff competition from Google's Android and Chrome operating systems, Canonical's Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Microsoft's Windows 7 Starter Edition. Like Canonical's and Google's products, Meego is based on the open source Linux kernel.
Interestingly, Meego bundles a version of its operating system with Google's Chrome browser but says that if users prefer a "fully open source browser solution" Google's Chromium is also available.
This release shows that while the Meego community might think that its software is ready for prime time, Nokia isn't so certain. The firm announced yesterday that its N900 smartphone will not support Meego. The problem for Nokia is that its previous incarnation, Maemo, is starting to feel left behind when compared to Android 2.2 or even the Iphone OS.
Nevertheless, with Meego 1.0 out, it should give users wanting to ditch Windows Phone 7 an even greater choice when it comes to free, open source operating systems. It can be downloaded here. µ
Tags: Microsoft
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It's good to see such an intense level of support for Linux and it shows how flexible it really is. Finally we are getting to the point where the complexities of Linux are being masked for approachability by the mass market. It really looks like the competition is seriously going to give Windows a run for the money in the generic, multi vendor hardware arena. It's impossible for Microsoft to compete against the vast number of developers that are supporting Linux to provide hardware support for any and all possible devices.
Maemo feels outdated? It's a quite modern Debian based distribution based on a 2.6.28 kernel and with many good repositories, which can run firefox mobile (fennec) and has flash 10 out of the box. Both for tech/linux geeks and anyone else that should sound like a pretty strong mobile platform, offering many things no other mobile product can today.
And as noted above, getting Meego for your n900 should never be a problem either. :)
Good grief - are you having trouble interpreting the message? They didn't announce it yesterday, they announced it months ago and repeated the same line yesterday.
Nokia have said they will not be releasing a "commercially supported" version of MeeGo on the N900, but they WILL be releasing a non-commericial version of MeeGo for the N900 (the N900 being the standard MeeGo handheld development hardware platform, btw).
The difference between a "commercial" and "non-commercial" release of MeeGo? The latter means you can't go running to Nokia Care for help and support, which is hardly a big deal.
The touchscreen enabled handheld version of MeeGo 1.0 is due in June/July.
But their willingness to be outright evil has so far controlled the market. M$ managed to peddle single-tasking DOS for ten years after it should have faded away. Bill Gates himself said the future of computing was OS/2. -- In hindsight, he probably thought he was lying.
But reality is catching up. M$ spent enough on Vista to go to the Moon, according to Gates, and produced only an enormous pile of crap they try to just forget.
I think, despite the claims that W7 runs on netbooks now, that bloat just makes it impractical to have any future there.