Formally launching MeeGo Community Device Programme

Randall Arnold has been put in charge of the MeeGo Project's Community Device Programme, where developers can get hold of various devices in order to further their MeeGo efforts: Intel is providing ExoPCs for tablet development. To get them into your hands, we now have an online application to get your project proposals in front of the community approval committee. But first, check out the wiki page for the program, where you will find the submission requirements, suggestions, and a list of available device types. The programme, like the rest of meego.com, aims to be an open and transparent process. So individual devices are exposed from manufacturers by platform/device champions. More details in Randy's post.

MeeGo Coding Competition extended to 31 July

The follow-up to last year's successful Maemo Coding Competition has had its deadline extended. Ryan Faulkner said, today we're extending the deadline to 31st July so everyone has a chance to take part. We're also really proud that our community members have raised over €500 towards the prize bounty so far, and we're still collecting right up til the end! Last year we reached an incredible $1000 so that's the target for this year. Along with the main prizes of trips to the MeeGo conference in November and a chance to win N900s and MeeGo devices, there's a lot of great reasons to take part. Most of the submissions so far target Maemo 5 on the N900 using Qt, with the aim of porting these to numerous MeeGo platforms in future.

N900 MeeGo "Developer" Edition is renamed "Community Edition"

On the MeeGo-handset mailing list, Jukka Eklund has announced that the N900 Developer Ediiton will be changing its name to "Community Edition": As you can see from the title and our wiki, we have changed the name of the edition slightly. We feel this name gives a better idea on the direction we are going with this initiative. Also, we have been working on the plan for the Summer Release. Based on the community feedback we are focusing on few areas this time: performance and more applications/settings. I welcome everybody interested to join the team to help on those aspects, please follow the discussion here on ML and IRC. Hopefully this will give potential users a clearer picture of the project and its goals. An FAQ of sorts has also been published, following questions as to the relationship of the Consumer Edition to the MeeGo core.

Planning for Wayland in MeeGo 1.3

One of the big architectural changes upcoming for MeeGo (and discussed in-depth at the conference in San Francisco last month) is the move to Wayland to provide the display server. Carsten Munk is looking to shine the lights of focus and transparency on these efforts: One of the things we're trying to achieve in 1.3 is Wayland support, but there seems to be very little documented on actual plans/tasks to be done and not high transparency on what's being done currently. So how do we change this? - we need to get all the effort pushed into this as we can and ideally not do too much duplicate work :). If you're interested in joining the discussion on Wayland and MeeGo, sign up to the MeeGo-developers mailing list and jump in.

Changes to desktop launching in MeeGo trunk

Auke Kok has posted to meego-dev describing some of the initialisation processes around the MeeGo desktop, which are about to hit the development trunk: I've adjusted several things in the way uxlaunch operates in the recent weeks, and the most important changes are about to land in Trunk. I'll try and explain how things will work a bit in here since it affects the way we start the desktop session significantly, and this affects any image you can make.

What changed exactly? Well, the biggest change is that there is no hardcoded session table anymore, and so now each session needs to be defined in a session definition file instead. That means that instead of telling uxlaunch "start /usr/bin/mutter --sm-disable", you'll now tell it to 'start the x-meego-nb' session, and something will instruct uxlaunch that that implies 'mutter' etc. In addition to architectural cleanliness, the new approach also allows the user to override the settings without being root.