MeeGo Technical Overview: OSCON Presentation from Sunil Saxena

Today at OSCON, Sunil Saxena gave a MeeGo Technical Overview with details on the whole MeeGo stack from the hardware layer to the core operating system to the applications that are developed to run on top of MeeGo. Sunil talked about how MeeGo is a full client open source Linux stack, and he described a variety of the key architectural components that make up the MeeGo distribution.

• MeeGo APIs: Qt Toolkit and the MeeGo Web Runtime for application development.
• Communication Services: ConnMan, oFono, Telepathy and BlueZ Bluetooth to manage voice and data connectivity for the platform.
• Internet Services: WebKit, libSocialWeb and GeoClue for rendering web content, providing web run time support, exchanging data with web services and determining location.
• Visual Services: OpenGL, OpenGL ES, QPainter, GTK /Clutter (legacy) and X provide the core 2D and 3D graphics capabilities.
• Media Services: GStreamer, PulseAudio and GUPnP for audio/video playback, streaming and imaging functionality.
• Data Management Services: Tracker, ContextKit and PackageKit for extracting and managing file meta-data, retrieving data about the device context and managing the set of installed packages on the device.
• Device Services: DSME, SensorFW and System Policy Mgr for managing device state and exchanging data with the device.
• Personal Services: Tracker, Buteo and Accts-SSO for managing user data on the device and managing user accounts to enable single-sign-on for web services.
• OS base: Built on the Linux kernel with Glibc libraries, D-Bus, libudev and Gconf. The hardware information is separated out into a hardware application layer for specific drivers and other device information.
• MeeGo Security Architecture: hardware root of trust for the device, SHA1 encryption, access control using resource tokens, and secure storage.

While MeeGo is an open source environment, the applications that people develop for MeeGo can be either open source or under a proprietary license. Integrated social networking services and other online services along with rich media provide a customizable framework to give you additional flexibility to design your applications. We have standard APIs across all of the client devices, so you can write one application with minor changes for the various user experiences. The MeeGo API is Qt-based, and we provide a full SDK for people to use to start developing applications today. Upcoming APIs will have additional functionality including web runtimes, Qt mobility with additional mobile libraries, and the MeeGo Touch Framework to name a few. The MeeGo SDK uses Qt creator, a full integrated development environment to create MeeGo applications, including the user interfaces for your application. We're still working on adding more to the SDK to give developers additional functionality, but people can get started using Qt to develop MeeGo applications now.

You can read Sunil's entire MeeGo Technical Overview presentation materials (pdf link) for more details about MeeGo technologies and to learn more about developing MeeGo applications.