The Meego OS will run on Nokia's N900

THE PRAYERS have been answered and users of Nokia's N900 smartphone will be able to load the Meego 1.1 operating system on their devices very soon.

Meego, a open source Linux based smartphone operating system that came about through the combination of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin looks like it might just have what it takes to drag Nokia out of the smartphone junkyard. Now, thanks to community help, the firm's underrated N900 smartphone will be one of the first devices of its kind to officially receive Meego support.

Harri Hakulinen, spokesman for the project listed the numerous updates to Meego including the kernel, X-server, the GCC compiler, battery loading meter and even the Fennec browser. There are still bugs present but Hakulinen says these are being ironed out before the final release of Meego 1.1 for the N900.

Along with the development of Meego, work is still continuing with Maemo, another Linux based operating system, with Hakulinen saying that a public release of 1.3 is "quite close". He also says that it is possible to dual boot Maemo and Meego on a N900, which is particularly handy if you use an application on the older Maemo operating system that hasn't been ported over yet.

On the question of porting application over, with the use of Nokia's now open source Qt framework and its various APIs, it should, in theory, be easy to develop code that runs on both Maemo and Meego. That said, code once, run many systems have never exactly been foolproof as any Java developer will confirm, but with dual booting possible, real world testing shouldn't be too hard.

The N900 represents something of a hybrid device from Nokia. The smartphone was pitched as an 'Internet device' or pint-sized tablet and though it was far from a commercial success, it garnered a cult following. The fact that it ran Linux and development could be done with C, Java and other popular languages has resulted in a very active community for the device.

That community has in many ways come to the device's rescue as Nokia fumbles around with Symbian. Thanks to the work of volunteers, one of Nokia's most capable devices will be getting a new operating system. µ