MeeGo - The Mobile Linux Platform: OSCON Presentation by Michael Meeks

Novell has provided significant contributions to MeeGo and to its predecessor, Moblin, so it was interesting to watch Michael Meeks from Novell give his perspective on MeeGo during his session at OSCON: MeeGo - The Mobile Linux Platform.

In this presentation he talked about a number of interesting MeeGo features and talked about what makes MeeGo distinctive.

• Fast Boot - Boots in less than 10 seconds with a focus on getting it to a real usable state while still booting quickly. Your best power savings is when the computer is off, and always turning it off is more feasible when you have a very fast boot time.
• Usability (pretty) - Excellent user interface designed for these smaller devices and form factors with a good use of the limited screen space.
• Social - Social networking integration with GPS location services for supported hardware along with instant messaging.
• Media - Uses Banshee as the media player to play your music, videos and more.
• Productivity Tools - Appointment calendar, tasks and Evolution for email.
• Build Images - Easy building and image creation using OpenSUSE Build Service (OBS) and MIC for image creation.
• Compatible & Eclectic - Uses Qt with cross platform / standard developer APIs to build applications, but it also has the flexibility to support other runtimes.

Maintaining a whole distribution can be very time consuming and difficult, and you don't want to go it alone. We can all save time and effort by working together, which is one of the reasons that Moblin and Maemo combined. Working together on MeeGo gives us more time for innovation, and we can share the time required to maintain it. You can re-use MeeGo while adding your own value on top of it.

For more details, you can see the entire presentation (9 MB pdf link) with screen shots and additional information on various MeeGo features.