In general pop over to #mer on freenode

see : http://wiki.maemo.org/IRC to use the webclient.

There’s a Q7 conversation happening as I type; if you want to help get it working then you have to get involved

I don’t know if that means Canonical and Mer are going to go in separate directions or not… I agree that it would best if they both worked hand in hand on both platforms (there’s no reason for Ubuntu-MID to JUST be an ARM platform, it could be for all MIDs). We’ll just have to wait and see.

The only thing I noticed is that installing the VirtualBox extas broke it, so I started over again and skipped installing the extras. You can try it if you want to but be sure to keep the original images zip file around so you can revert back to it.

The device is in my pocket and locked. So it is in a sleep state, most applications do little to nothing except services (music player, file downloading, etc), event listeners for network events (phone calls, messages, etc).

I have the device out, unlocked and am using it. So it is in an active mobile state similar to the sleep state in that services run in the background if I want them to (music player, file downloading, etc), but one application is active and owns the interface.

I dock my device, which is connected to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, ac adapter. So it would be in a desktop state. Applications would behave a lot differently, they would share the display, have better interfaces, run simultaneously. The system could perform at it’s most optimal as it doesn’t have to conserve battery.

Having network states would also be very useful. When connected to your work or home network, all applications would behave normally, but when connected to a public network maybe you don’t your applications to send your private information across that network, and another state would be bandwidth limited connection (if you are on a connection where you pay by the megabyte), so maybe the OS and applications won’t do updates.

Having application change OS states would be useful, for example games could put the OS into a game console state and sleep the other applications so that the game isn’t interrupted and has smooth performance.

Windows Vista has been the worst about these kinds of things, I’ve had Vista automatically download an update and restart the computer while I was playing a game (I thought my computer crashed, until I saw the “installing updates”). I’ve had it do indexing while I was streaming a video off my hard drive (which was causing stuttering in the video, as my hard drive was over loading ). I’ve heard users complain about going over their 5GB cap on their mobile broadband internet because of a windows and applications update while they are connected. You can configure windows to not do all this stuff but it’s not something users know or think about until they have to, and since there are no OS states, you have to manually set up your system when you want these things or not want these things.

I guess everyone’s working on the assumption that Moblin won’t be (re)targeted for MIDs in any reasonable time scale. (They should have released something usable *last year* to get some momentum anyway.)

in response to the question why not maemo it’s becuase maemo isn’t fully open source. maemo has a strong open source base but the final user interaction layer doesn’t have source available. mer was founded for this very reason. mer’s aim is to be a fully open source maemo replacment on nokia’s internet tablets and a finger friendly mobile OS for other devices.

But the focus appears to be on ARM as far as I can tell so far. Developers are using N800, N810 etc.

Are you saying that both Canonical and Mer will be outputing seperate distro’s? I hope not for the customers sake.

Steve

Mer uses Suse’s superb (GPL) openbuild service to support a number of architectures; multiple armel variants, ppc and even more obscure ones like i386

GR: Ubuntu-MID to switch from Moblin to Mer. http://bit.ly/17efKl