Excellent first review from Linux Magazine!!
Backed by the Linux Foundation, MeeGo is a custom Linux platform which arose from the joining of Intel’s Moblin with Nokia’s Maemo. It’s targeted at many platforms including of course netbooks, but also in-car navigation systems, phones, televisions and yes even, tablets.
MeeGo NetBook User Interface
Choices
So you want to buy a netbook for some logically sound reason no doubt, but what choices are there? Well currently there’s ahh, Windows and ahh, Windows. We are all too well aware of what Microsoft did to the netbook market, but in all fairness perhaps the main problem was that Linux just wasn’t ready. It certainly seemed to fit well; cheap, low cost, light. Linux fits right in. The versions of Linux which came with first generation netbooks weren’t bad per se, but they weren’t fantastic either. They were more of a custom hack on a full blown desktop operating system, and then castrated. Ouch.
Sure, we geeks just celebrated the fact that we could buy a computer without paying Microsoft tax, but it didn’t last long. It turns out that battling a monopolist is hard work! Now, one generally purchases a netbook with Windows and then installs their own favourite flavour of Linux instead, such as Ubuntu Netbook Edition. It’s great that there are now so many options for Linux on the netbook (such as Jolicloud and xPud), but it’s a shame that these weren’t available earlier on. Even so, despite all these great options consumers still cannot purchase a netbook with Ubuntu pre-installed from department stores (although Dell and other providers do sell limited models in a small number of countries, which is a good start).
So what does it take? Many felt that Linux needed a solid, stable, combined front for netbooks. Ladies and Gentlemen, that has finally arrived with MeeGo.
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- Novell announces support for MeeGo (v3.co.uk)
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- Intel answers Microsoft’s Linux ‘noise’ with MeeGo show (go.theregister.com)
- MeeGo Linux platform gains allies at Computex (arstechnica.com)
