So, Intel and Nokia and the Trolls at Qt have linked up and are merging Maemo with Moblin to create something called MeeGo

(I think I’ve got the caps in the right places…)

As this is a a potential target development environment (and especially since the development platform of choice is Qt), I’ve been very interested in checking it out, once it got to a fairly stable state. Now, the first ‘unified’ environment is available and I can take it out for a spin.

Installation

An installation is a two-phased job for me: the environment, itself, and the development SDK. First the SDK:

This has to be done on a Linux Box, because it’s a whole ‘chroot’ environment. If you don’t know what that is, think FreeBSD ‘jails’. If you don’t know what that is, think kind of like virtual machine, but not really. It’s just an isolated filesystem that looks like a whole different machine, inside of another machine. You log into it, and from there on, it appears to your login process that you’re on that machine.

I installed the chroot image on an Ubuntu 10.04 (latest) Fusion VM on a Macbook, which gave me a ‘kind-of’ VM inside of a VM configuration. It could drive you crazy, thinking about it – but the bottom line is: it works. Including the emulator. The only issue I had was that video wasn’t visible. But, I did have a Meego desktop to play with, and the SDK appears to be available.

The SDK is a kind of typical remote cross-platform development environment, except it’s not really needed, for the netbook app – the target is just another x86 linux implementation. In fact, I wonder if you couldn’t just put the SDK on the netbook, compile there, and then debug remotely.

There are probably performance issues, there – especially if the builds got big – but you do wonder…

On to the Hardware – ASUS 1000H (dual boot w/ easy-peasy image)

The initial task over, it was time to put the OS on some real hardware. I have an ASUS 1000H, dedicated to just such endeavors. It has easy-peasy in the first partition, but I left some space in a blank partition and can dual-boot through GRUB.

This turned out to be a little tricky – the installation process wouldn’t let me install without a boot sector, and it wanted to use a different file system called btrfs. For some reason, the installation didn’t like that in a non-default partition and complained that a btrfs system is unbootable. So, I had to fallback to ext3 (ext4 was not an available choice.) It hung when trying to load the boot sector (which I suspect boots into something non-btrfs, so I killed it, booted back into the easy-peasy image, and did a ‘grub-update’. Handy – the new grub 2 scans the disks for likely OS candidates and presents them in the boot menu.

Voila! Boot into Meego and everything looks fine.

The Verdict

Well, it is cute!!

Those little brightly-colored blocky people populating the intro video and all of the promotion materials look real friendly, and they look happy, too! How bad can it be?

When you hover over a menu item, it squoidges (my own term – I don’t know what else to call it – basically a ‘bounce’ animation done in scale-factor.) Run your mouse along the menu bar, and you get squoidge, squoidge, squoidge… as the mouse passes over the menu.

In terms of layout, it kind of follows the Ubuntu UNR/easy-peasy form – a bar at the top to select various ‘panels’, which are fixed size and take up the whole screen, although each panel may be divided into subpanels.

Beyond that, it’s more like a cell-phone OS. You have an applications panel – that seems normal. And you can select applications, launch them, and add them to a favorites panel. That seems normal, too (in fact, most of the applications are generic Linux apps, that look and feel like generic Linux apps.

It’s very heavy on the ’social’ and ‘personal’ aspects. Everything is geared towards showing all your friends, allowing your friends to ping you or you to ping them, your mail and calendar are right up front.

What is different is that things you’d normally expect to see in a web browser – facebook contacts, calendar updates, blogs, etc., can show up directly on a panel. The idea, presumably, is that getting to those would be quicker directly from a panel, rather than having to bring up a web-browser and navigate to a page – something that can be onerous and time-consuming on a small device.

No Login

Again, reflecting the device-OS ancestry of Maemo – there is no capability for multiple user accounts. it’s really tuned to reside on a personal device. So personal, you don’t have to log in. The upside is that when it comes up, it’s ready to go. The downside is that if someone else is using the netbook, they’ll likely screw up the desktop (or view that you have screwed up the desktop.) Not only that, but with it’s heavy emphasis on ’social’ apps, it’s like someone else logged into your Facebook app. All of your personal details are there.

I’d have to concur with others who have installed it on hardware – it’s really fast. It looks like this is a really trimmed down Linux distro. A lot of heavy stuff that used to happen at boot time is apparently deferred, or eliminated, already, because it’s not something that is needed on a device OS.

So, it boots fast, it runs fast.

Is it usable?

My initial impression (thus far) is that it would be a really good tablet OS (or, of course, a cellphone/pda OS), rather than a netbook OS. I don’t think I’m going to give up the easy-peasy environment on this netbook, just yet. For one thing, my netbook serves as a ‘kitchen’ pc, with different accounts so my Significant Other can log in and mess up the screen layout anyway she wants…

In the tablet/OS environment, text input is always the issue. Nothing has beat the keyboard, yet, but smaller devices can’t handle them. So, there have been a variety of solutions – virtual keyboards, character stroke recognizers, full handwriting recognizers, and the occasional oddball scheme designed for eye-tracking (which can work quite well, but it is an odd way of expressing things) – all of these have have their trade-offs and none have been proven to be faster or more accurate than the good old keyboard.

Of course, this is version 1.0 and there is a whole lot yet to be done. It’s definitely a different paradigm, I think, one that’s going to take a bit of getting used to. It seems more natural to smaller devices without a keyboard, but I think that is the real intended direction. Having it as a netbook OS is just icing.

The Symbian development platform (on which I’m currently working) has historically been incredibly arcane. A modified C++ with a non-standard exception mechanism, for starters. And a whole bunch of pieces to install, one of which is a doctored up Eclipse IDE.

Qt doesn’t alleviate the proliferation of installation pieces, at the moment, primarily because everything is still in transition. In fact, you have to install a whole bunch more new pieces to get the development environment together on your desktop machine and on the phone.

QtCreator

One of those available new pieces is QtCreator, Qt’s answer to the IDE.

I’ve used a lot of IDE’s over my career, and they all have their pluses and minuses. MSDEV is great for MS-only applications (and is particularly brilliant in C#). XCode is cool on the Mac, and Eclipse is great for Java. I’ve been a fan of Eclipse since working with it on a Java project a couple of years ago, and so was looking forward to using it in the Symbian environment – since Carbide C++ (the blessed Symbian IDE) is based on it.

That proved to be somewhat less than productive – the environment is insanely fragile. I managed to break the debug perspective completely, just trying to move a few windows around (the Variables window, specifically). It took some research and digging down into the nest of hidden project files to find the proper configuration file to delete and get some order back to the IDE. Then, too, communicating with the phone required yet another panel with arcane settings, and that had to be reset, frequently.

Since I’m using Qt, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to use Qt’s blessed IDE, even thought it’s still at an early stage of development.

Order of Magnitude

I can honestly say, QtCreator has been a lifesaver for this project. For starters, though still in early incarnation, it’s really good and intuitive to use for Qt development. And, it seems to communicate with the phone more readily.

There are a lot of glitches, still – I have yet to get the on-device debugger to work. Judicious use of qDebug() statements have been the stop-gap measure around that – effectively reducing debugging to the proverbial ‘print statement’ technique. Not optimal, but it works. And I can’t get the debugger to work on the device in Carbide-C++, either, so it’s no effective difference, there.

Better than nothing.

But, what has been the real lifesaver has been the ability to take advantage of an outfall of what Qt ultimately is: a cross-platform development environment. What this means in practical terms is this: you can do a lot of development on the desktop!

When you install Qt, you can install two versions – one for the desktop, and one for the phone. QtCreator has a (admittedly wanky, but slated for improvement) configuration panel that allows you to switch between build configurations: desktop or device (actually, there are two configurations for the device, as well – emulator vs. actual device.) You have to flip a bunch of switches to do it, but I’ve gotten it down to a fairly manageable routine and can flip between the two environments with relative ease.

That ability has been nothing but a godsend (or maybe a troll-send) for this project of limited funding and limited timeframe. Turnaround (the time it takes to go through a code, run, debug, fix and do it again cycle) on the device is slow. Turnaround in the emulator is even slower. But turnaround on the desktop is fast – no loading required.

Because of that, I’ve been able to do a large bulk of the coding effort – getting the big stuff in place – on the desktop. It helps to create an appropriately sized main window, and you do have to have a jumparound here and there (primarily for the OpenGLES stuff and the menu system), but most of the code and components are exactly the same.

So, when it comes time to deploy to the device, most of the hard stuff has been done. Now you can focus on the harder, device-specific stuff.

Not the Same

Just to come full circle, QtCreator has some real promise. It has glitches – the VIM emulator is a great idea, but I’m seeing a bunch of issues with it. I’m told that much of this is fixed in the newer version.

It’s difficult to specify and organize source folders – I’ve taken to creating source file ‘hulls’ on the command-line in the directories I want them, and then update the .pro file, accordingly. The IDE will honor what you’ve created, and show appropriate folder organization.

Not on the Mac, though – the project contents are just a flat list of entries. You can still get to stuff, but you may have to scroll through a long list of other stuff to get to it. I imagine that will get fixed in the next update or two as well.

Summary

Overall, I think this will only get better. The Trolls (now part of Nokia) are working on this furiously (note the announcement of Meego and the parallel announcement that Qt will be the development platform of choice on that environment – it already is on Maemo).

For me, QtCreator will definitely become the development platform of choice for future Qt applications, with decreasing reliance on the platform-specific IDE.