MeeGo Being Ported To Wayland 76
An anonymous reader writes "From the MeeGo SF2011 conference this week it was disclosed that MeeGo may ship the Wayland Server with the tablet version of the MeeGo 1.3 operating system for release in October."
A reasonably annotated version of the presentation slides. Unfortunately video of the talk is not yet available.
Here he comes... Cue ominous music! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Hate to break it to you, but it's not
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_0 [freedesktop.org]
Re:Here he comes... Cue ominous music! (Score:4, Informative)
> Hate to break your bubble, but wayland is an X server.
No it isn't. Wayland is a rallying point for X-haters and is an attempt to specifically dump X.
Re:Here he comes... Cue ominous music! (Score:5, Informative)
>Wayland is a rallying point for X developers and is an attempt to specifically dump X.
Fixed that for you. Everyone working on Wayland is an X.org dev. They know what they're trying to kill off.
Oh, and Wayland will also have an X server.
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Fixed that for you. Everyone working on Wayland is an X.org dev.
Quite. That's the problem. They've been working on X for ages and are bored and fed up with it. It's time for them to move on. Which is fine, but it doesn't mean it's time to kill off X.
They know what they're trying to kill off. Oh, and Wayland will also have an X server.
This is one of the disingenuous arguments trotted out like clockwork every time. You can get X servers for Windows and OSX. They both suck compared to Linux because the X clie
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"This is one of the disingenuous arguments trotted out like clockwork every time"
This. The answer given by the Wayland people to remote X is always: "Well, just run an X server under wayland". They completely miss the point that this breaks the network transparency that is a critical and essential feature of Linux.
People rely on this network transparency of X clients, and breaking it makes Wayland an non-starter. Unfortunately, if all Linux distros move to Wayland, that'll be the end of Linux as a viable
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Quite. That's the problem. They've been working on X for ages and are bored and fed up with it. It's time for them to move on. Which is fine, but it doesn't mean it's time to kill off X.
No they recognize the horrible kludges required to achieve modern effects like composition & video, the context switches that degrade performance, X'sstrictly 2D worldview which impedes coord translation & mapping, all the extensions, and all the redundant functionality that no modern dist uses. Then they reasonably ask why they even need X at all.
This is one of the disingenuous arguments trotted out like clockwork every time. You can get X servers for Windows and OSX. They both suck compared to Linux because the X clients are always second class programsn and don't integrate properly. It will be the same with Wayland.
Integrate with what now? If a dist goes with Wayland then most apps running over QT & GTK are going to run natively. It's not infeasible that GTK /
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Then they reasonably ask why they even need X at all.
The answer to that is simple: there's a metric buttload of apps out there that talk X11 out the back. Many of those apps are commercial. Many of them use neither GTK nor Qt. Moving all that lot to some other protocol is really quite an enormous job (set of jobs really) and it's not at all clear that everyone has money to spend on what is largely perceived as busywork; snazzier compositing doesn't maintain a factory information system.
But that's not to say that anyone much has a particular fondness for the X
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They know what they're trying to kill off. Oh, and Wayland will also have an X server.
This is one of the disingenuous arguments trotted out like clockwork every time. You can get X servers for Windows and OSX. They both suck compared to Linux because the X clients are always second class programsn and don't integrate properly. It will be the same with Wayland.
Wayland is pretty much "X.org without X11" (plus some other stuff) -- that is, the most modern rendering technologies used by current X.org will also be used by Wayland: DRI, Mesa, Gallium3, etc. X.org and Wayland are integrated at the core.
Sure, there will be inconsistencies between X apps and native apps, but it's not like people will be using X11 apps if they don't specifically need X11.
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Sure, there will be inconsistencies between X apps and native apps, but it's not like people will be using X11 apps if they don't specifically need X11.
So, people like me who need X11 will be screwed over? Is that what you're trying to say?
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Not quite, I'm just saying the rest of us don't care.
Will Wayland be network transparent? (Score:3)
You know what's really cool about my N900? I can export it's display across the network. I can also run graphical programs on my N900 off my laptop, file/print server or web/email server. Without tweaking, without rebooting, without having to start an X server or X server "compatibility mode" and without having to start some "remote desktop viewer". You know why? Because it runs X. I don't really have much of a problem with Wayland, except that they seem to think d
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Compositing window management is a minor feature and certainly one which should not impede the network experience.
Not exactly impossible. But it is based on shared buffers. Adding network transparency would mean that you continuously transfer buffers over the network, causing huge network traffic. Already today, modern X applications a
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Compositing window management is a minor feature and certainly one which should not impede the network experience.
It's not a minor feature in a modern desktop. In the old world when you moved a window the WM had to work out the damage to the ones it fell over, send off invalidation messages, incur a bunch of context switches so the windows could repaint and draw through clip regions so the lower z-order window didn't inadvertantly paint over windows above it. If every window is a surface then you don't need to invalidate / repaint damaged windows when one moves over the top of another, just recompose.
And Wayland is
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I don't say they should be nothing. I wouldn't oppose a new interface if it had networking transparency built-in from the start (because that's the only way networking can get efficient). Also, if they want to reduce context switching, they should put more work into the server, not less. I think the Berlin/Fresco project was going in the right direction; unfortunately it died because at some point the developers got at odds with each others about certain design decisions.
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It's not a minor feature in a modern desktop.
It is on mine. I do real work, rather than play with shiny shiny.
In the old world when you moved a window the WM had to work out the damage to the ones it fell over, send off invalidation messages, incur a bunch of context switches so the windows could repaint and draw through clip regions so the lower z-order window didn't inadvertantly paint over windows above it. If every window is a surface then you don't need to invalidate / repaint damaged windows when one
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As for remoting, I still haven't heard any adequate reason that the entire local desktop should be hobbled by an antiquated technology and half a dozen band aid extensions for the sake of running some remote apps. X can run on top of Wayland and there will be other ways from VNC on up that will work with native
Not dead after all (Score:1)
it's good to see MeeGo ain't dead after mama Nokia cheated papa Intel with his friend Microsoft.
Re:Not dead after all (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it is good to see that.
However, this kind of thing is precisely why Nokia dropped Meego. Nokia is in the business of selling phones, not on some never-ending quest for the ultimate Linux UI without ever getting something out of the door.
The mobile phone marketplace is very fast-moving. At some point, you need to stick with what already works, and polish it, instead of dropping it for the latest shiny instead.
The tragedy with Nokia is that they were 90% there with Maemo. While their competitors surged ahead, they dropped Maemo and virtually started afresh with something about 10% ready instead.
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Amen. Maemo looked really promising 5 years ago when the N770 shipped. It looked even better 3 years ago when the N810 shipped. Then just about time when they were going to start using it on mainstream smartphones, they changed direction and spent the last 3 years reinventing the wheel. Such a waste.
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If anything, Nokia is exactly the one to blame for doing that. They broke compatibility across Maemo releases (IIRC).
In Maemo 5, when TrollTech and Qt was already in the company, they release the whole OS based on GTK+, but they say that the future is Qt (agreed), and release Qt 4.6 updates for the N900 with some specially crafted widgets for Maemo 5 integration. However, they are at the same time developing Qt Quick, which only appears in Qt 4.7, and yes, it's way better, but is yet another change for deve
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this kind of thing is precisely why Nokia dropped Meego
On the contrary, Nokia never got to MeeGo. They were part way with their Maemo-derived, MeeGo compatible device when Elop announced a wholesale shift to being (effectively) a Microsoft OEM.
And had Nokia not stymied the group working on Maemo, then they would have gotten there, as you acknowledge. But in the end they would likely h
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Well... maybe because they were 90% there with Maemo is that they were borged.
Think about it from the MS perspective... borging nokia was prolly their last chance to gain marketshare in the smartfone market and it would have been lost forever if Maemo/MeeGo were to be succesfull.
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Nokia ruled the smartphone market globally with symbian for ages. I have a 5 year old symbian phone (N95) and it does everything (gps, nice camera, java, flash, accelerated 3D graphics, wifi, multitasking, etc, etc, etc).
It was only in the US where symbian didn't have much acceptance, but if you consider the global market share then nokia was the ruler of the smartphone market until 2010 Q4 when android surpassed Symbian as the most common operating system in smartphones.
MeeGo was never a player in the smar
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Except development proceeded apace on both architectures. But Intel (obviously) didn't provide support for non-Intel platforms, even though they had no means nor right to block it.
They had been planning a shift to Qt some time before, and to a great degree it was a smart move due in no
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Wrong. Nokia's solution to the ultimate Linux (and Symbian) UI is/was Qt, which is pretty much agnostic as to which rendering system it runs on, and which already does run on Wayland (so this future switch isn't exactly a surprise to them).
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'At some point, you need to stick with what already works, and polish it,...'
Ah, yes; the Polished Turd process of software development; also known as Agile.
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it's good to see MeeGo ain't dead after mama Nokia cheated papa Intel with his friend Microsoft.
You can't kill it, it's open source, it will die on its own if it isn't any good.
Stupid editors can't spell Waylon (Score:2, Funny)
But good to see MeeGo embracing country music anyway.
(Mod me +1 funny or -1 offtopic, but don't bother trying to educate me -- I already know Wayland is a graphics server, like an X server "but better".)
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I already know Wayland is a graphics server, like an X server "but without important features used by people who do actual work with Linux".)
FTFY.
What is it? (Score:2)
I'm sure this is all very exciting if you know what MeeGo is.
I've gone to the site, read the homepage and got a hint. Then I read the About page and got corporate name-checks and drivel about leveraging stuff.
Is it an OS? Or what?
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You can think of MeeGo as "just" a Linux distribution. However, it's optimized and focused in bringing the usual Linux stack to all sorts of devices (TVs, cars, phones, tablets...).
It's a true open source project, or at least, it aims to be (is just beginning), and provides some sort of tools, and middleware. It's also a specification that you have to comply if you want to be MeeGo certified, so you can grant that software runs on all MeeGo devices.
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Let me guess you've never tried to search on Google and clicked on the 3rd or 4th link ? Because that probably points to this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo [wikipedia.org]
I suggest you try it next time, it aint all bad.
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If I go to your official site, and still have to go to Wikipedia to find out what the hell it is you're making, then your official site is a miserable failure.
I don't need Internet 101, thank you very much, especially after having had it from the other respondents whose posts you presumably skipped in your rush to deliver it, but I hope the warm glow of smug superiority brightened your day. :)
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MeeGo is one of those little scooters that fat people drive around in the Wal-Mart because they're too obese to walk 30 feet to pick up their 5 gallon jar of pickles, adult diapers and box of shotgun shells.
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Thank you! :)
Now why couldn't *they* say that...
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Because they assume that if you're interested you already know what Meego is? Especially if you regularly read slashdot.. Should they also explain what KDE, Xorg etc is everytime news about them comes along?
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That's at best a pale explanation.
MeeGo is a fully open source Linux OS under the Linux Foundation umbrella that seeks to be a reference baseline OS for all sorts of consumer electronics. Phones, Tablets, Netbooks (less these days), TVs, set top boxes, and in-car computers.
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Nokia have been cutting back on support since the Winphone agreement with MS. Hell, they have even outsourced Qt now.
The funny/sad thing about Meego, is that these days it is more Moblin (a Intel project) then Maemo. Hell, i am not even sure if the 1.2 release have transitioned to Qt as the main interface toolkit on the netbook and IVI variants (the variants that Intel focused on).
I base the claim on it being RPM based, as Maemo have been DEB based since day one. Moblin also was DEB on first release, then c
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You should know by now that official websites are useless to find what they are actually about. For that there's Wikipedia.
MeeGo is a Linux-based open source mobile operating system project. Primarily targeted at mobile devices and information appliances in the consumer electronics market, MeeGo is designed to act as an operating system for hardware platforms such as netbooks, entry-level desktops, nettops, tablet computers, mobile computing and communications devices, in-vehicle infotainment devices, SmartTV / ConnectedTV, IPTV-boxes, smart phones, and other embedded systems. MeeGo is today hosted by the Linux Foundation.
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Simple: It's the non Apple-trademark infringing version of iPee.
Seriously though: (once again) FTWA [wikipedia.org]
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TL;DR: You're on the Internet. Use it.
I guess you missed the part where I used the Internet to go find the official MeeGo site. TL;DR indeed.
Please ship SOMETHING compatible (Score:1)
I'm the proud owner of a N900, but I'm very frustrated in how MeeGo has stagnated, especially regarding Microsoft's attempt to nail it into its coffin. Maemo/MeeGo is by far the best mobile OS around that provides true power to the user and may actually, over time, have the same kind of exposure that Android did influential in growing "App" developer networks. Sadly, with few if any devices shipping its going to remain a playtoy.
I'd like to see MeeGo become basically installable on any device that Android
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Not looking to good on that front, I'm afraid. The focus is now more on tablets and netbooks ever since Nokia left the party. But it could do OK in the tablet space, if there are good apps for it that come out.
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Tablets are as useless as they ever were.
Want to type something? Sorry one handed virtual keyboard only. Since you have to carry the device, hope it's something short you're writing.
Want to make a call? Sorry we cut that feature.
Want to watch a film? Here's a wedge for only $30 so you can see the screen properly.
iPads only sold because Apple fanboys will buy anything made by Apple.
Smaller devices are the new PC ie a 'platform' that can make a company $tens of billions.
It's interesting how great Nokia we
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Ah, so since tablets don't fit your exact requirements they are not useful for anyone.
Better call all the tablet manufacturers and their customers and let them know that they only think the devices are working for them.
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It's interesting how great Nokia were only became well-known after they became Microsoft's bitch.
How great they were, you know, over 4 years ago back when their highend phones were good because we didn't expect as much of them as we do today. They arguably had the best hardware but since the 'smartphone revolution' they have been relegated to the low-mid end, low margin market. The N900 is great but it isn't going to win the mainstream consumer market.
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This is not something MeeGo or its developers can fix, at least not on the mobile device (ARM-based) space. Google has worked very hard to make sure the user space is incompatible with more common Linux distributions and software, and vendors are loathe to merge their drivers and device support upstream (because that would require more work.)
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Probably out of luck if you buy a phone using those chips. Those incorporating PowerVR GPUs may, eventually, run better with Wayland - as used in Intel's Atom platform.
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The problem with the way hardware is handled in the ARM space is that the SGX drivers that work on one platform may not work on another, even if the SGX core is the same. On top of that, you'd need them built explicitly for Xorg 1.9 and compiled against glibc (so basically, the vendor would be shipping both Android and MeeGo, or using the same hardware as one shipping MeeGo.)
It's all about vendor-dependence.
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Google has worked very hard to make sure the user space is incompatible with more common Linux distributions and software
Have they? I'd love to see some evidence of that.
You'd also have to harass Google to compile any binary only bits (namely the graphics drivers) for glibc and to work with Xorg 1.9.
What? Why would you even want binary drivers? In any case, Google is no more responsible for supplying 3D drivers then the eponymous Linus himself. Either harass the hardware vendor or write your own damn driver.
uh so what is Wayland server? (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protocol)
A method for applications to access a lower level of the OS than X, according to my naive understanding. Sounds a lot like directX?
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Please note that the correct URL is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29 That way, it will work with anything parsing correctly formed URLs (like QuietUrl).
Of course it doesn't help that Slashdot must be prevented to recognize that as URL, because otherwise it "helpfully" converts the %28 and %29 back to parentheses, forming an invalid URL and thus breaking everything expecting a valid one (also it doesn't help that Firefox [and probably other browsers] does the same in the UR
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Rather than complaining about Slashdot URL-decoding characters, you could just provide a proper hyperlink. BTW, the text of the link doesn't require any special treatment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29 [wikipedia.org]