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Mer: a year after• By Carsten Valdemar Munk (Stskeeps), Mer lead developer

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Before Mer there was Deblet..

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Before Deblet there was the Debian port..

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In Deblet we tried hildon­desktop..

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What did we find out?• There's a reason why Maemo is like it is:

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• Power saving

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• Memory saving

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• Performance

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October 2008: A call to reconstruct MaemoTablets are not under-powered embedded systems, they are powerful, power-efficient, economical handheld computers.

Make Maemo a general platform for tablet devices.

Make it more developer-friendly.

More hackable.

Align with standard Linux distributions.

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October 2008: A call to reconstruct MaemoSeparate device and platform code

Open development of the Maemo platform - the device-specific and vendor-specific differentiation development can be closed.

It should be easy to port existing desktop applications - platform peculiarities should be kept to the absolute minimum required for the mobile use-case.

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Building our project in our basement..• Creating Maemo 'from scratch' – initially building all of Maemo by hand.

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• On top of mojo.handhelds.org Ubuntu port

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• Getting hildon-desktop running and going from there

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• Hacked up autobuilder.

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• Adding support for Mer to Scratchbox. Trauma that will never heal.

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First proof of concept

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And then news broke..• December 2008: Maemo 5.0 (Fremantle) pre-alpha

• “This early release comes with an invitation to build variants based on Maemo 5 compatible with existing hardware like the N800 and N810. Maemo SW can't promise commercial quality for such configurations but through maemo.org we are able to collaborate at a community level with technical support, license changes and code.”

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Transforming into Mer..Namechange from M-R to Mer

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• Moving into #mer – allowing us to create a community of our own

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• Establishing wiki.maemo.org/Mer

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• Why maemo.org?

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Items in people's tablet basements

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Meeting a talented russian

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Where has Mer been ported to?

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Dealing with hardware vendorsA social contract for the vendors wanting to adapt Mer on their hardware.

Principles for the interaction between the Mer project and hardware vendors.

Modelled on the open attitude by Nokia with regards to the Internet Tablets.

wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Documentation/Vendor_Social_Contract

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VSCNo tivoization

Open source kernel modules

Vendors are encouraged to work with maemo.org to provide repositories containing closed firmware and bits, intended only for specific device types

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The second year: Three desktops• Plain (X11)

• Polished  (SW GL)

• Shiny (GLES)

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Plain

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Polished

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Shiny?

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Some things from the roadmap• Week 42-43; Integrate Fremantle sources. Hildon Input Method Thumb kbd – first version of

Polished. Improving the status area (backlight, battery, NetworkManager, volume, bluetooth). Cross-compiler in OBS. Initial versions of Plain.

•Week 44: Full localization en_US, multi-layout HIM

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• Week 45: 0.17 release. N8x0 Vendor Repository. Sound, GPS, etc.

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• Week 49: 0.18 release (1.0?)

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Mer in 2010• Maemo Platform as the no. 1 platform for open* devices

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• Mer 1.0 & 'Shiny' (GL enabled) on N900, N8x0(W) with proper hardware support

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• Mer 2.0: Harmattan based

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• Platform wars are won in the reference implementations.

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• Mer being a standalone OS that is usable from the moment you have it ported.

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• (* open as in conforming to our Vendor Social Contract)

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To hear more about Mer and our methods• Friday 15:30 –N800 room: Mer: How the community innovates

• Saturday 16:15 – 770 room: Git hands-on workshop

• Sunday 11:00 -N800 room: Building for Mer

• Sunday 14:30 Lightning talks: Mer from a user's perspective

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http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer

• #mer on irc.freenode.net

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