Nokia's plan B?
They may be hoping that, if Windows Phone ends up crashing and burning, Nokia will come and buy them out for a couple billion
A number of former Nokia employees have banded together to maintain the MeeGo smartphone OS and even release new hardware running the software. Formally launched this weekend - though its LinkedIn page says it has been around since 2011 - Jolla "will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones", the company pledged. …
Seriously doubt that Nokia would buy them. If they are successful, they may end up buying Nokia itself
There are a lot of moving parts in play.
I wish them well since they know low power usage and they would cater to a market that wants to have their phone be more of a phone than a gaming platform.
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Not had the chance to fiddle with MeeGo as much as I'd like, but Maemo before it was fantastic as a smartphone operating system (and by smartphone I mean "a phone you can do advanced things with", not "a phone that is shiny and sells well to idiots"). It still has the best multitasking of any smartphone OS, hands down, and can do more out of the box than pretty much any current smartphone, let alone those present at release.
Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing what Tizen can do. So long as it doesn't turn out like Bada...
I agree with A/C 10:30.
Good luck to them with this, but I got one of the Touchpads and, after planning to put Android on it and never getting round to it (and discovering preware), I found that I really like webOS.
I have high hopes for Open webOS and really hope some phone and tablet makers pick it up and run with it.
MeeGo is *really* good. It's slick and functions really well. In fact I have trouble faulting it. Also all the people I've shown it to are impressed and ask where they can buy it - dear me, if only they could.
That's why it was so gaulling for Elop to cast it aside in favor of a far inferior OS in WP. They'd done all the super expensive R&D.
Great news that someone is going to capitalise on the work already done.
Meego on the netbook wasn't that much better than Ubuntu netbook remix at the time. As for the Intel tablet project I was writing software for well considering they could never get Meego to run stable on the device (probably more due to Intel's shit Atom hardware than Meego but still) which may be why Intel was so quick to abandon the platform. Meego was ok but was basically still born and lives on those that dream of what could have been.
Nokia are well shot of these chancers good riddance to bad coders. Nokia are better off with Windows Phone and as the platform continues to grow and Microsoft add more features the synergies between their great software and Nokia's great hardware will become apparent.
The Windows Phone 8 offerings from Nokia will tempt people away from the Malware ridden fragmented Android platform just you wait.
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> The Windows Phone 8 offerings from Nokia will tempt people away from the Malware ridden fragmented Android platform just you wait.
We've been waiting since Feb 2011 and nothing significant seems to have changed. Apart from Samsung snatching Nokia's position as the #1 mobile maker (both smart and dumbphones), some now-obsolete Lumias released to a cautious welcome, Nokia's credit fating transformed from AAA to junk status.
Last time I heard a friend of the wife showing off her new mobile phone ("I don't like Apple, so I went for a Windows phone") I rushed downstairs in the hope of finding a Lumia "in the wild"... turned out it was actually a high-end Android.
In retrospect there's a lot of truth in that... Android is pretty much the Windows of the phone world, with the same characteristic strengths and weaknesses: cheap, ubiquitous, a dizzying array of platforms, vendor lock-in traps, fragmented hardware, vulnerable to malware, less stable and reliable than the Apple alternative (as the owner of a WIndows PC and Android phone, it pains me to admit that last point).
What I *am* waiting to see is whether the transition to NT kernel means that Windows 8 mobile devices will become just as malware-riddled as Windows PCs.
Let me see...
XBL? Nope, not available in Malaysia
Zune? Nope, not available in Malaysia
Store? Yes, but very limited compared to other countries'.
Bah, even Apple has finally gotten off their asses and launched the music store and movie store in Malaysia now.
WinPho? No thanks, for the crap support MS has in store for Malaysian users, I'd pass.
However, I can't see the room in the mobile market for a very good very expensive phone from a relative unknown. Perhaps they'll manage a great launch product they can use to showcase and end up succeeding, but I can't see it.
Please, please let them prove me wrong.
So you looked a one random location. How about http://n9-apps.com/ or http://store.ovi.com/applications#/applications/?terminalId=N9 or any of the Apt repositories you can use with your MeeGo device.
If the new company can turn a profit, that's all that matters. It just needs to find a niche, not to aim for the top 3. There are plenty of people wanting a proper open source mobile device, not an Apple walled garden or a Google ad trojan.
"not an Apple walled garden or a Google ad trojan"
I suspect this is trolling, but anyway... Either the Meego stores are walled gardens (i.e. software only accepted after thorough review), or they have the potential to contain advert ridden software or malware. Care to explain why it's technically special in either of those regards (i.e. not its current relative obscurity making it undesirable to write software for)?
No, there are fewer apps for it because nobody cared. It was just a too-late-platform that could have worked had Nokia actually got it out the out the door on time.
I don't understand the love people on here have for Nokia when RIM is nothing but a joke. Is it because they are being ravaged by the bad man from M$?
"I don't understand the love people on here have for Nokia when RIM is nothing but a joke. Is it because they are being ravaged by the bad man from M$?"
It's not a love of Nokia at all. I couldn't care less about the new Lumias, really (though I kinda like WP7). It's a love of Linux, and how brain-buggeringly brilliant it was when Nokia did it.
Windows Mobile fell a generation behind, and has never been able to catch up even given Microsoft's vast resources. The same thing happened with Blackberry, and now they're in a death spiral.
Regardless of how good it was when it was released, the world has moved on. So how are Meego going to catch up?
Hardware keyboard please (one like on the E7-00 would be fine - the N900 keyboard is too small), decent navigation, decent dictionaries (like the mobisystems ones - although the synthesised speech on the built in E7-00 dicitonary is cool), and finally, allow compilation using gcc 4.7 or above *on the device*.
I was pleasantly surprised how well Swype works on the N9. Every once in a while you have to teach it a name, place or funky word but most of the time you just blaze away with just yourt thumb. Nevertheless, folks who use consoles a lot would likely still want a hardware keayboard. So yay for that!
but so is MeeGo now and it kicks major ass. As long as they manage to be profitable enough that'll be just fine. I have doubts about a different UI as the Swipe UI is so utterly brilliant that it might be hard to improve upon but easy to mess up. Then again, these folks should know what they are doing. I really welcome this development.
I have an N950, which along with the N9 is perhaps the best phone Nokia ever produced, and I was becoming a little worried that in future I'd have to go the Firefox OS/Tizen HTML5 route, failing that Android maybe even BB10.
Windows Phone and iOS were obvious non-starters.
Wishing Jolla all the best for the future, they've certainly got my interest.
Whilst I hope this works out, I can't help feeling they've brought over some of Nokia's arrogance with them - i.e. when the market goes one way, Nokia carries on blindly - and look where it's got them.
I just can't see this having any impact at all, and raising the capital to make phones is going to be an enormous challenge - without operator ranging they're simply not going to be able to afford it. Still someone has to try, so good luck to them.
A Linux distro for smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers, postmarketOS, has introduced in-place upgrades.
Alpine Linux is a very minimal general-purpose distro that runs well on low-end kit, as The Reg FOSS desk found when we looked at version 3.16 last month. postmarketOS's – pmOS for short – version 22.06 is based on the same version.
This itself is distinctive. Most other third-party smartphone OSes, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS, or the former CyanogenMod, are based on the core of Android itself.
The UBPorts community is in the final stages of preparing its next release and it's calling for testers.
OTA-23 is getting close – the project's Github kanban looks quite good to us – and if you're lucky enough to have one of the project's supported devices lying around, then you can help.
Many of them are a few years old now, so there's a good chance that you've already replaced them and they sit unloved and neglected in a drawer. The starred entries in the list of devices are the best supported and should have no show-stopping problems. In order of seniority, that means: the LG-made Google Nexus 5 (2013); the original Oneplus One (2014); two models of Sony Xperia X, the F5121 and F5122 (2016); and Google's Pixel 3a and 3a XL (2019).
At The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, Linus Torvalds said he expects support for Rust code in the Linux kernel to be merged soon, possibly with the next release, 5.20.
At least since last December, when a patch added support for Rust as a second language for kernel code, the Linux community has been anticipating this transition, in the hope it leads to greater stability and security.
In a conversation with Dirk Hohndel, chief open source officer at Cardano, Torvalds said the patches to integrate Rust have not yet been merged because there's far more caution among Linux kernel maintainers than there was 30 years ago.
Microsoft has made it official. Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 distributions are now supported on Windows Server 2022.
The technology emerged in preview form last month and represented somewhat of an about-face from the Windows giant, whose employees had previously complained that while the tech was handy for desktop users, sticking it on a server might mean it gets used for things for which it wasn't intended.
(And Windows Server absolutely had to have the bloated user interface of its desktop stablemate as well, right?)
EndeavourOS is a rolling-release Linux distro based on Arch Linux. Although the project is relatively new, having started in 2019, it's the successor to an earlier Arch-based distro called Antergos, so it's not quite as immature as its youth might imply. It's a little more vanilla than Antergos was – for instance, it uses the Calamares cross-distro installer.
EndeavourOS hews more closely to its parent distro than, for example, Manjaro, which we looked at very recently. Unlike Manjaro, it doesn't have its own staging repositories or releases. It installs packages directly from the upstream Arch repositories, using the standard Arch package manager pacman
. It also bundles yay to easily fetch packages from the Arch User Repository, AUR. The yay
command takes the same switches as pacman
does, so if you wanted to install, say, Google Chrome, it's as simple as yay -s google-chrome
and a few seconds later, it's done.
Version 21.3 of Manjaro - codenamed "Ruah" - is here, with kernel 5.15, but don't let its beginner-friendly billing fool you: you will need a clue with this one.
Manjaro Linux is one of the more popular Arch Linux derivatives, and the new version 21.3 is the latest update to version 21, released in 2021. There are three official variants, with GNOME 42.2, KDE 5.24.5 or Xfce 4.16 desktops, plus community builds with Budgie, Cinnamon, MATE, a choice of tiling window managers (i3 or Sway), plus a Docker image.
The Reg took its latest look at Arch Linux a few months ago. Arch is one of the older rolling-release distros, and it's also famously rather minimal. The installation process isn't trivial: it's driven from the command line, and the user does a lot of the hard work, manually partitioning disks and so on.
A bunch of almost unbelievably clever tech tricks come together into something practical with redbean 2: a webserver plus content in a single file that runs on any x86-64 operating system.
The project is the culmination – so far – of a series of remarkable, inspired hacks by programmer Justine Tunney: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε, Cosmopolitan libc, and the original redbean. It may take a little time to explain what it does, so bear with us. We promise, you will be impressed.
To begin with, redbean uses a remarkable hack known as APE, which stands for Actually Portable Executable – which its author styles αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε. (If you know the Greek alphabet, this reads as "actmally pdrtable execmtable", but hey, it looks cool.)
Comment Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take.
Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count 'em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop.
Right after the latest release of the KDE Frameworks comes the Plasma Desktop 5.25 plus the default desktop for the forthcoming Linux Mint 23.
SpiralLinux is the result of the creator of GeckoLinux turning their attention to Debian – with an interesting outcome.
Some Linux distros have many remixes and respins, while some have very few. For example, there are multiple downstream variants of Debian and Ubuntu, but very few of Fedora. The Reg FOSS desk is only aware of one for openSUSE: GeckoLinux, whose Rolling edition we looked at earlier this year.
Now, the creator of GeckoLinux – who prefers to remain anonymous – has turned their attention to one of the most-remixed distros there is, Debian, to create SpiralLinux. What can a new remix bring to the already-crowded table of Debian meta-distributions? (That is: distributions built from other distributions.)
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