MeeGo1.1 to be available for Nokia N900 with dual-booting fun this month

The long wait is almost over, dear Nokia N900 owners. The Finnish company developers are almost done porting MeeGo to the sweet QWERTY slider and promise to release it to the general public in a few days.

The update will be available on the MeeGo site, which should enable dual-booting of Maemo and MeeGo on the Nokia N900 so you can get a taste of the upcoming MeeGo mobile OS.

There is no exact date mentioned for the PR 1.3 update but its Very soon as our previous leaks of the Release date document last Month that shows Meego1.1 will be released to the N900 on October 21-27.

The bad news is that this is a try-at-you-own-risk kind of deal so Nokia will not be offering support for the MeeGo-enabled N900 officially. This is not to say they won't be releasing updates or fixing bugs, but you will be the one taking the risk of something going wrong with the new OS.

Official Press release from MeeGo.com

"After many busy months of MeeGo development, we have finally come to a stage that justifies proud blogging around our MeeGo for N900 adaptation project. As you may already suspect, or have heard from IRC or discussion forums, we now have 3G audio call functionality with proper ofono signaling and pulse audio stack working on N900, including our brand new open source modem adaptation for N900!

The achievement was possible because of extensive co-operation between our MeeGo N900 adaptation team and Nokias Telephony and Audio team. Special thanks for this goes to people like Kai Vehmanen, Ameya Palande, Pekka Pessi, Jyri Sarha, Jouni Peltonen, and Sami Sirkiä. There has been a lot of work done around this topic by many people, I am not even aware of many of them, so a big thanks to everyone.

At this point, I need to remind you about the basics: MeeGo is an open source project and if you choose to install the MeeGo image to your N900 device, you do it completely at your own risk. If you are not confident that you know what you are doing with it and why, please don't use it at all. Especially now, if you start playing with call software under development, you need to watch after your phone bill, as well. Also, please use the latest repositories only, or the next weekly image that is downloadable from the MeeGo repositories every Monday.

There has been huge amount of work done in all areas during the summer and fall. Ameya Palande, Carsten Munk, and Marko Saukko managed to handle kernel updates, x-server update, Compiler update, SGX update, and so on. We are now running .35rc5 kernel with support for most devices on N900. Markus Lehtonen fixed the BME for us, so now we have battery loading working. There was also a bug in the wlan driver that was relatively hard to find. After Carsten had proven his theory about the bug, we got good support from Teleca Russia. Big thanks for Juri and others there for fixing that.

Later, during the fall, we have had hard time with some sticky bugs, and filling some smallish but time consuming holes in MeeGo core implementation. One of the hardest ones was the fight with the fennec browser. The ARM compilation of it proved to be especially tricky with the version of gcc compiler that we are using in MeeGo. After weeks of work, it now somewhat works, but we can’t get the latest version onboard before some nasty gcc compiler bugs are patched on MeeGo.

On the Maemo side, there have been interesting, supporting developments going on, as well. The PR 1.3 update is quite close now, and with that you can easily dual boot between Maemo and Meego on your N900. There is also a possibility of developing applications supporting both operating systems, based on Qt and Qt Mobility APIs on the Maemo side. It means that you can develop once in PC with Qt Creator, and test your applications on both Maemo and MeeGo, directly on your N900 device!"