By Ryan Compton

“We basically just killed Moblin” -Pete Kronowitt

Last week in Barcelona it was announced that Nokia and Intel will merge the better parts of Maemo and Moblin into a new product aimed at creating a unified framework for mobile device development, MeeGo. Today at SCALE 8x I spoke with Intel’s Pete Kronowitt about the project and what it means for the open source community.

What is MeeGo?

MeeGo is a new platform designed to run on mobile devices under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. The MeeGo OS is specialized to run efficiently on your netbook, smartphone, or carputer and will deliver a full Internet experience (ie Java, Flash, Silverlight, Adobe Air) on each of those machines. A stylish user interface provides quick access to commonly used applications with an emphasis on social networking tools. MeeGo is aggressively stack optimized for execution with a small footprint and speed. You can go from the “ON” button to the internet in 20 seconds on a low end netbook with a solid state drive.

What does MeeGo bring to open source?

Meego allows a developer to build an application in the well understood Qt development environment and run it with the core OS designed for Moblin. This provides a straightforward way to get your application running on any equipment supported by MeeGo allowing for more expansion of open source software into the exploding mobile device market. There were 17 publicly committed Linux vendors for Moblin and most have provided positive feedback about the MeeGo announcement.

What about the history of Meego?

Near the end of 2007 Moblin was released with the aim of bringing open source to mobile devices. Not too long afterward ASUS came out with a triumphantly successful line of netbooks so we got on board with that to. We were able to get OpenHand UK to bring us Clutter while collaboration with Nokia brought a couple hundred more developers in and we were able to release MeeGo in Q1 2010.

How can the open source community start developing?

The vast majority of the core OS has been built with a considerable amount of work by engineers at Intel and Nokia. Right now we’d like to see people writing apps for release through Intel’s AppUp or Nokia’s Ovi. The major push is for development to happen in Qt but there will be continued support for Clutter and GTK.

What browser will MeeGo use?

Look for the developer preview in March.

How do you get all those UI graphics and still have a reasonable battery life?

A major challenge is making sure support exists for the broad developer community. Since the community utilizes both multimedia frameworks, MeeGo suppports both gstreamer and Helix. More important to extend battery life is ensuring the entire software platform is optimized. Tools play an important role to analyze misbehaving applications. Intel created a widely used tool called PowerTOP which provides tuning suggestions to lower power consumption. Definitely check out PowerTop.

Can you bring up a terminal?

Yes. (Note that bringing up a terminal in front of the SCALE audience results in much applause with oohs and ahhs)

Anything else you’d like to say?

Not too long ago you would watch Star Trek and Captain Kirk would say “Computer” and then ask the computer to do just about anything. We’re basically there now.

If you’d like to speak with Pete he can found playing guitar at the Talking Stick in Venice, California on February 23rd.

More Resources:

Meego Home Page at the Linux Foundation http://www.linuxfoundation.org/lp/page/meego

Ryan Compton’s Homepage http://www.math.ucla.edu/~rcompton/