Nokia and Intel combined effort towards creating a robust mobile platform based on open source solutions is getting better and better. Fulfilling the promise Imad Sousou (Director, Intel Open Source Technology Center) has annouced first public images of a new MeeGo OS available on Intel-Atom and ARM based devices. This is a day many were waiting for.

Since the community was heavily preparing for that event, I hope now we will see a rapid presentation layer and application repository creation to make planned release in May happen, however it's a bit challenge to get the image now as repo servers seem to be overloaded.

For early adopter there is a bit of guildelines available, especially about how to run MeeGo on N900 ARM based Nokia device. But before you start celebrating, be aware that what was published is base OS distribution with Linux kernel and middleware layer. Now what you run on this is currently up to you and what you make run on it.

Will this be a jump to brand new era of mobile Linux? Will it beat the phone market? Will you have MeeGo powered TV set in 6 months? Hell, no idea, but anyway it's worth trying ;)

In terms of system and/or application development I am no more than a user with a bit extended view & experience in Linux systems, so I guess my testings are not infected with too much geek'ism and will trurly show what statistical device fan could feel taking first steps into MeeGo.

Downloading & preparation.

OK, that's easy. Community released two USB images with Chrome and Chromium browsers respectively. I took Chromium version - one click less to get it and besides, this image was available from official MeeGo repository so I could avoid huge traffic at downloads site. Clever, huh?

Installation instructions are pretty clear to newbies, even for Linux they noticed not every Linux user knows how to use 'dd' command. After few minutes I had my USB key ready with bootable MeeGo Live. Next step:

Installation.

That hurt a bit. But mostly because I tried to be smart and didn't want to wait until get home to play with my testing laptop. Instead I downloaded Virtual Box and quickly prepare a VM. Installation went smooth and even after first boot I got into post-install settings wizard, but that was the end of story since every subsequent reboot ended with blank screen. Referring to the source one can find:

System Requirements

 * CPU: Intel Atom or Intel Core 2 CPU (support for SSSE3)

    Note: MeeGo will not work on non-SSSE3 CPUs

 * Platforms with the GMA-500, Nvidia, or ATI Graphics chipset are not supported.

OK. I got Dell D630 and perfectly fill both conditions, so what the heck? Never mind... let's try VMWare. Another couple of hours to download and install VM (including few Windows reboots) and another MeeGo installation and yet another boot up fail. Arrrrrghhhh... Apparently MeeGo wants to be the only known system that won't work under VM.

I was so desperate, that I quickly downloaded some tools and repartitioned my Windows laptop to have some spare Gigs so I could install MeeGo in a traditional way (I posted short how to on http://forum.meego.com). Boot from USB, install, reboot, post-install and "Houston, we got MeeeGo".

Usability.

First impressions? Sweet, even sweeter. Nice and fast UI animations, lightweight icons and clean interface gives very nice feeling of mobile system designed for web-mostly usage. After few minutes I had it configured for my GMail account and was already browsing the web. Funny, but I had a feeleing that first couple of minutes playing with Chromium showed the browser is quite unstable. Display was getting frozen intermittently and browser stopped responding. After some time it just started working properly.

What else do we get? The main entry point int MeeGo is called Myzone. It stands for a desktop place with shortcuts to most fresh calendar & tasks items, with unread main notifier, few icons for most used application like browser, mail client and eventually list of thumbnails from recent activity. By activity I mean recent pages viewed or twitter updates and other live feed coming from 'status' panel. The latter is a command center for all live feeds associated with internet presence of a user. At the moment we have Twitter and Last.FM, however I couldn't log on to Last FM using my account.

Next to Myzone, there is a 'zones' panel. Briefly, it works like multiple desktops in every regular Linux environment. You can place and arrange open application to bring some order to you device. Then there come 'applications' panel containing several games, simple editor tool, multimedia player and some system tools. The third is 'status' panel I already mentioned, followed by 'persons' - a place you can add you IM accounts to have your contacts displayed and to start chatting in an easy way.

Multimedia, the next panel, is somewhat tricky. Upon some unknown rules it displays mutimedia you can run in a player. It also shows current player queue and give the opportunity ti launch Banshee - MeeGo multimedia player. Banshee seems to be working fine, however again, I couldn't run any last.fm content although I logged in and it showed my favorites and stations. Surprisingly, it doesn't play MP3 on DivX and similar formats. This comes (I think) from MeeGo policy of being open source and supporting open source only technologies and formats. This was also the cause that my WiFi didn't start - I have Broadcom wireless card that shipd only closed driver binary.

Of course, you can download and compile drivers, codecs and whatever comes as closed, but for typical end user this may be a job too big. Although I totally agree with open source ideas, I don't think MeeGo is best counterpart to fight against closed formats, especially most popular ones like MP3 and position that OEM will provide whatever their device need (drivers, codecs, tools) closes they way for repurposing harware people already have. I believe there should be some kind of extras or non-free repository, that users CAN CHOOSE from.

Other panel or desktop icons contain shortcuts to device manager (storage, battery, sound volume), gadgets (errrm... this I think doesn't work yet) and Bluetooth and network connections.

MeeGo 1.0 was released with localizations to a great number of languages (including full Polish translation I am proud to be part of) so it is already prepared to conquer the Wolrd.

Conclusion?

Well.. I loved the idea at very fisrt glance, so I keep standing that this is it. A versatile OS for mobile computing, web & communication oriented system facilitating daily routines. Enriched with telephony, GPS maps or DVB-T software will make other than computers devices like phones, navi or TV sets more friendly and funny.

I realize version 1.0 is not perfect and can't wait to see more.