Hi Everyone

I'm sure you've heard the news: Moblin and maemo are merging! We are taking the best pieces from these two open source projects and are creating the MeeGo software platform. Both teams have worked for a long time to support the needs of the mobile user experience - and MeeGo will make this even better. We want it to be fun, focused, flexible, technically challenging and ultimately, something that can change the world.

We all use mobile devices every day. The power and capability of handhelds has reached astounding levels - netbooks have been a runaway success - and connected TVs, tablets, in-vehicle infotainment, and media phones are fast growing new markets for devices with unheard of performance. Our goal is to develop the best software to go with those devices. The teams behind maemo and Moblin have plenty of experience and even more ideas on how to make things better - and together we will create something special.

So what does this mean for Moblin and its community? It's a huge opportunity. There are some changes (and those are always scary), but I think they are all for the better. Things will quickly shift to the new site, but from a technology point of view, migrations should be smooth. Especially if you are an application developer; everything you have done so far should continue to work - and with Qt and its development environment there are even more and easier options available to develop new and exciting apps for MeeGo.

The MeeGo website is still evolving - you'll run into a few "coming soon" pages as we pull all the content together and get things ready for our first project release in the second quarter. But there's already a lot to see - and a community to join! Please take a look - and come back often as we approach that first release.

We really want to hear from you. Be in on IRC, on our developer mailing list, or through bugzilla. MeeGo is an open project and it will be successful through its developer community. It's my personal goal to make sure that we can all together be successful. And have fun.

I invite you to join us at meego.com.

Imad Sousou

Director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center
(and now also co-chair of the MeeGo steering group)

From a business standpoint, it does make a lot of sense to merge these 2 projects, now let's see if the merge can be handled smoothly technically speaking... might not be as easy as it sounds.

Besides that, here are a selection of feedbacks I wanted to blog about today:

• Having only Linux Ubuntu Hardy as supported operating system is a bit restrictive. I guess this is right but it happens that Ubuntu is my primary operating system so it made sense for me to support Ubuntu. Also, this is probably the system I know best so it was easier for me to begin implementing SaveMyConf for Ubuntu. Anyway, for an alpha version, I think this is not much of a problem... I'll try to have more systems supported for v1!
• Not being able to release a website compatible with all browsers is just ridiculous. Indeed, IE is really really badly supported. Blame my small web design experience for this one (and my laziness for not testing regularly with IE). I realized too late that my site was a complete mess on IE (even IE7 has problems). As it was a bit late and as Windows is just not yet supported as an operating system, I decided to release anyway and to put warning messages for people visiting savemyconf with a browser that is basically not firefox. I promise browser compatibility will be a lot enhanced in the next release...
• The back button of my browser does not work. Right, again, I realized this too late. The modifications required would have required too much refactoring so this will be solved for the next release.
• Your double entry navigation system [ndlr: left to choose the machine and top to choose the action] is a bit confusing. Concerning this one, I don't know... I don't have enough feedback to judge yet but it might be true. I wanted to innovate a little bit but I must admit that it might be confusing for normal people. I need more feedback on this one.. What do you think?
• In terms of SEO, your site sucks because google can only view 1 page. True, savemyconf relies a lot on javascript (the whole navigation is ajaxified) and I now realize that I might have gone too far in this direction. I will probably moderate my use of Ajax for the next version to have a more Google / Lynx friendly website.

That's all I can think of right now, please keep the feedbacks coming! They are what will make the next version suck less

PS: As it might help someone else, here is a few more details on my packaging problem: I actually mistook with one build-dependency version which caused the package to miserably fail installing. It came from the following line in the debian/control file of my package:

Build-Depends: cdbs (>=0.4.49), debhelper (>= 5), python-central (>= 0.6)

The python-central dependency version was wrong, I changed 0.6 to 0.5.6 to solve the problem of my package not installing on a fresh Ubuntu Hardy (8.04).