plz..has ANYBODY tried Maemo??

**ve4cib** · March 8th, 2010

I've never used Android (other than briefly tinkering with an older version of the SDK), but I just got my N900 in the mail on Friday, and have been playing around with it since then.

Maemo is pretty nice. It's been fairly intuitive to install/remove/update software, thought finding the MAC address so I could get it onto my LAN at home was more exciting. My first instict was Terminal > $ ifconfig -a. Unfortunately ifconfig (and indeed the entire set of standard GNU utils) isn't installed by default. There's a package to get them though. Anyway, the MAC address was also found by going to Applications > About. So easy enough.

Overall I'm liking the N900. The software selection is good -- nothing spectacular, and there's a lot of buggy/in-development software still -- but you can usually find something that will do what you need.

I have yet to use the N900 as an actual phone though. I plan on signing up for a plan sometime next week and getting the SIM card. I bought the device primarily as a PMP/pocket-computer, not as a phone. Apparently it can't handle MMS (but does to SMS), but I doubt that will be an issue for me

This is the first I've heard about MeeGo supplanting Maemo on the N900. That'll be interesting, but since MeeGo has been around since 1999 and has a fairly active community I'm expecting some good things to come from the arrangement.

**rahilm** · March 8th, 2010

Originally Posted by azangru

I wish they don't abandon the N900. It's an amazing device, but it pitifully lacks some basic apps, and its software needs some polishing here and there.

that is obviously true!!!! it is, after all, a LINUX device

**gnomeuser** · March 8th, 2010

Originally Posted by azangru

I've seen this announcement too, specifically that MeeGo repositories are going to open up for N900 by the end of this month or something like that, but I couldn't figure how it's supposed to work. Will Maemo update itself quietly to MeeGo, or will it just use apps designed for MeeGo.

I wish they don't abandon the N900. It's an amazing device, but it pitifully lacks some basic apps, and its software needs some polishing here and there.

I think a full on upgrade over the air is unlikely. You are switching the underlying OS from debian to a Fedora/openSUSE/homegrown system including a a switch from the ancient dpkg to a modern rpm with packagekit packaging solution (much yay, dpkg needs to die). This alone will make the update really hard to perform flawlessly. Another big upgrade is the move from gtk and clutter to qt (why oh why) which is likely to involve some rather nasty data conversion problems.

I think what is likely is that Maemo 5 will continue to get bugfixes till such a time as MeeGo is in a suitable state. Then it will be offered as an experimental upgrade which requires flashing the device.

This likely also means that feature upgrades for Maemo 5 won't be issued. The focus is MeeGo and you shouldn't expect to see major improvements be rolled out. I suspect Maemo 5 will handpick fixes from the MeeGo branch and port those, perhaps we will see upgrades to things such as Tracker since they already poured a lot of development into the much superior 0.7/0.8 branch which is nearly ready. Furthermore the developers of said software are very interested in moving all tracker deployments to the new code as it is much better in every way.