Partitioning

Usually, you get your device preinstalled by OEM and this means you have whole disk space dedicated to your WinXP. If you don't intend to erase it, you need to make some space for your new MeeGo installation.

In order to repartition the disk, we need a fancy tool that is capable of looseless partition operations. I decided to use EASEUS Partition Master because i) I found it and ii) it was free. If you have some LiveCD versions of, say, Ubuntu or Fedora you can also boot it and use GParted shipped. The idea remains the same - to move all existing data into one space and cut out some free space for new, unallocated area. With EASEUS it was fairly easy.

First, you'd better defragment your disk so you're sure no data left in the physical area of the disk you will cut. It usually takes some time, so once you hit OK go and get your coffee.

Next go to 'Move/Resize' and define a new size of your Win partition. You can put numbers or move the slider. I suggest to allocate at least 8G for MeeGo, however if memory servers, the installer will go on with 4.2G at least.

If you forgot to defragment the drive, no worries - it'll do it anyway.

Installation

Once repartitioning is complete just reboot the device from your USB key. In case you don't have booting key, please refer to MeeGo release page to learn how to do it.

Installation process looks quite generic. Next, next, next, and when you get to partitioning screen let the installer use remaining disk space and proceed. Never mind boot settings as installer shamelessly ignores your settings anyway.

Booting and post install

First time boot has to be completed in MeeGo to let you access fully operating system. Once it's done go to Applications -> Terminal:

$ sudo vi /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf

prompt 0

timeout 5

To have some time for the decission before it boots.

#menu hidden

To show the boot menu

label meego
        menu label MeeGo (2.6.33.3-11.1-netbook)
        kernel vmlinuz-2.6.33.3-11.1-netbook
        append ro root=/dev/sda3 quiet vga=current
label Other
        menu label Windows
        kernel chain.c32
        append boot 1
        menu default

Put menu default for your OS that you want to boot automatically and save&exit. From now on every time you boot you have a choice of OS to start.

In terms of system and/or application development I am no more than a user with a bit extended view & experience in Linux systems, so I guess my testings are not infected with too much geek'ism and will trurly show what statistical device fan could feel taking first steps into MeeGo.

Downloading & preparation.

OK, that's easy. Community released two USB images with Chrome and Chromium browsers respectively. I took Chromium version - one click less to get it and besides, this image was available from official MeeGo repository so I could avoid huge traffic at downloads site. Clever, huh?

Installation instructions are pretty clear to newbies, even for Linux they noticed not every Linux user knows how to use 'dd' command. After few minutes I had my USB key ready with bootable MeeGo Live. Next step:

Installation.

That hurt a bit. But mostly because I tried to be smart and didn't want to wait until get home to play with my testing laptop. Instead I downloaded Virtual Box and quickly prepare a VM. Installation went smooth and even after first boot I got into post-install settings wizard, but that was the end of story since every subsequent reboot ended with blank screen. Referring to the source one can find:

System Requirements

 * CPU: Intel Atom or Intel Core 2 CPU (support for SSSE3)

    Note: MeeGo will not work on non-SSSE3 CPUs

 * Platforms with the GMA-500, Nvidia, or ATI Graphics chipset are not supported.

OK. I got Dell D630 and perfectly fill both conditions, so what the heck? Never mind... let's try VMWare. Another couple of hours to download and install VM (including few Windows reboots) and another MeeGo installation and yet another boot up fail. Arrrrrghhhh... Apparently MeeGo wants to be the only known system that won't work under VM.

I was so desperate, that I quickly downloaded some tools and repartitioned my Windows laptop to have some spare Gigs so I could install MeeGo in a traditional way (I posted short how to on http://forum.meego.com). Boot from USB, install, reboot, post-install and "Houston, we got MeeeGo".

Usability.

First impressions? Sweet, even sweeter. Nice and fast UI animations, lightweight icons and clean interface gives very nice feeling of mobile system designed for web-mostly usage. After few minutes I had it configured for my GMail account and was already browsing the web. Funny, but I had a feeleing that first couple of minutes playing with Chromium showed the browser is quite unstable. Display was getting frozen intermittently and browser stopped responding. After some time it just started working properly.

What else do we get? The main entry point int MeeGo is called Myzone. It stands for a desktop place with shortcuts to most fresh calendar & tasks items, with unread main notifier, few icons for most used application like browser, mail client and eventually list of thumbnails from recent activity. By activity I mean recent pages viewed or twitter updates and other live feed coming from 'status' panel. The latter is a command center for all live feeds associated with internet presence of a user. At the moment we have Twitter and Last.FM, however I couldn't log on to Last FM using my account.

Next to Myzone, there is a 'zones' panel. Briefly, it works like multiple desktops in every regular Linux environment. You can place and arrange open application to bring some order to you device. Then there come 'applications' panel containing several games, simple editor tool, multimedia player and some system tools. The third is 'status' panel I already mentioned, followed by 'persons' - a place you can add you IM accounts to have your contacts displayed and to start chatting in an easy way.

Multimedia, the next panel, is somewhat tricky. Upon some unknown rules it displays mutimedia you can run in a player. It also shows current player queue and give the opportunity ti launch Banshee - MeeGo multimedia player. Banshee seems to be working fine, however again, I couldn't run any last.fm content although I logged in and it showed my favorites and stations. Surprisingly, it doesn't play MP3 on DivX and similar formats. This comes (I think) from MeeGo policy of being open source and supporting open source only technologies and formats. This was also the cause that my WiFi didn't start - I have Broadcom wireless card that shipd only closed driver binary.

Of course, you can download and compile drivers, codecs and whatever comes as closed, but for typical end user this may be a job too big. Although I totally agree with open source ideas, I don't think MeeGo is best counterpart to fight against closed formats, especially most popular ones like MP3 and position that OEM will provide whatever their device need (drivers, codecs, tools) closes they way for repurposing harware people already have. I believe there should be some kind of extras or non-free repository, that users CAN CHOOSE from.

Other panel or desktop icons contain shortcuts to device manager (storage, battery, sound volume), gadgets (errrm... this I think doesn't work yet) and Bluetooth and network connections.

MeeGo 1.0 was released with localizations to a great number of languages (including full Polish translation I am proud to be part of) so it is already prepared to conquer the Wolrd.

Conclusion?

Well.. I loved the idea at very fisrt glance, so I keep standing that this is it. A versatile OS for mobile computing, web & communication oriented system facilitating daily routines. Enriched with telephony, GPS maps or DVB-T software will make other than computers devices like phones, navi or TV sets more friendly and funny.

I realize version 1.0 is not perfect and can't wait to see more.

Nokia and Intel combined effort towards creating a robust mobile platform based on open source solutions is getting better and better. Fulfilling the promise Imad Sousou (Director, Intel Open Source Technology Center) has annouced first public images of a new MeeGo OS available on Intel-Atom and ARM based devices. This is a day many were waiting for.

Since the community was heavily preparing for that event, I hope now we will see a rapid presentation layer and application repository creation to make planned release in May happen, however it's a bit challenge to get the image now as repo servers seem to be overloaded.

For early adopter there is a bit of guildelines available, especially about how to run MeeGo on N900 ARM based Nokia device. But before you start celebrating, be aware that what was published is base OS distribution with Linux kernel and middleware layer. Now what you run on this is currently up to you and what you make run on it.

Will this be a jump to brand new era of mobile Linux? Will it beat the phone market? Will you have MeeGo powered TV set in 6 months? Hell, no idea, but anyway it's worth trying ;)

First, the MeeGo. I always second all open source projects. It was my path for independant consultant and developer. The excellent idea of killing or borders and constraint, opening your inventions to the world and grabbing others' ideas to adapt and adopt is unbelievable. More... open source projects are by the definition open, so everyone can join at any moment and everyone IS invited. The more hand, the better evolution on the way.

What about MeeGo? It's brand new effort initiated by Intel & Nokia towards building a decent, powerful yet lightweight, universal operating system for mobile devices like netbook or phones. Why so excited? Because it's open. So don't wait for anything proprietary that your phone manufacturers would (or not) provide to you in your black speaking box. Stand up, join the community and make your phone/netbook/GPS device or whatever you want work your way.

Having that, I already made my first step and got involved into MeeGo L10N area. Since I am more like PHP and web-oriented guy I can't so far find a place among all those geek programmers and I decided to apply Force to localization subproject. I've seen many badly translated UI's they were introducing more confussion than help and I don't mean to allow my new phone talk to me 'po polskiemu' because nobody took care of checking if translated string are suitable, or make any sense either way.

The other thing that woke me up this spring was and article that came to me thru Google Buzz. OMG! They are running Midgard for ten years already. See? Good stuff :)

This also remided me about my first commercial Midgard implementation. Back in 2000 when MS NT server made me cry and tear my hair off, I accidentally stepped into Midgard website. Those days it was kind of version 1.2, without any knee bending features but had something... user-friendly URL handling. No more index.php?id=123&style=456!

The bad news was that the only admin UI available was old Asgard and was not a tool for real rich content editing. Anyway, it took several months to put things together and Midgard combined with my home-brewer Nadmin Studio clone started to work for Poznan International Fair website including some 50 microsites - one per each exhibiting event. Whatever.

Today, reading the article, I just quicly pointed my browser to www.mtp.pl and, hey!, they are still runing some kind of Midgard. No idea what version, or if they use MidCOM or own solution but look at it. Another ten years old, pure and special Midgard website :)

Those days Midgard evolved a lot. Version 2 has been released, the design has changed a lot by moving towards independent content management solution that can be a web site or a desktop application, but one thing remains - Midgard is still a hell good and powerfull stuff.

The first and most important thing is that Midgard is in a way a Gnome software. I mean it relies heavily on Gnome components and its natural environment is Unix/POSIX. Hopefully, there is a path thru a dangerous jungle that leads straight to a Dark Side aka Win32.

Pre-requisities:

MinGW - POSIX port to Win32

MSYS - POSIX shell

Midgard dependencies - lots of them: glib, libgda, libxml2, iconv, crypt etc. Configure script will tell ya all.

Building environment

Easy, but not automated. Start with installing MinGW with MSYS by following instructions from the page. Fetch as many as you can find, standard libraries ports for MinGW and them get Midgard dependencies. Unfortunately not all have pkg-config config files, so you will have to create them to satisfy configure script. It will tell you what is missing.While unpacking dependencies put them into c:\MinGW\ structure to resemble standard FHS - it will save a lot of pain.

For now, you'd better forget about DBus. First, it is not so native as in Unix world, second you will have to build dbus-glib package on your own. To make Winland running you don't require DBus at all.

./configure && make && make install

Yes, that spell works here too, however until #1030 is fixed you need wrap lines #184 and #284 of src/midgard_connection.c with the following

#ifndef HAVE_LIBGDA_4
#endif

I suggest something like ./configure --with-libgda4 --without-dbus-support --prefix=c:/midgard2 command to prepare. This will disable DBus, enable libgda4 and put all stuff into c:\midgard2 based FHS structure.

TODO: Make Piotras install dependecies in $prefix path :) It is Windows, so you need all depending DLLs in bin folder under $prefix.

OK. Let's recap: environment built, dependecies installed, core compiled and installed. Next step: try it.

Configuring and running

I have tested Winland with SQLite so far. To make it run you need to create a config directory under C:\Documents and Settings\your_user eg. C:\Documents and Settings\solt\.midgard-2.0\conf.d. Using your favourite notepad.exe (joke) create midgard unified configuration file. You can use $prefix\etc\* files for reference. For initials tests use SQLite as DB provider.

With your configuration done, go to $prefix\bin and run midgard-schema.exe. If you are running XP you *may* encounter an application hang. This is probably caused by threads implementation and fact that sometimes Midgard tries to gda_init() more than once. This have to be addressed by our most valuable engineer, but till then it is safe to set env variable LIBGDA_NO_THREADS to any value (I prefer 'yes'). This will make GDA not using threads. I haven't faced that issue on Vista nor Win2003.

So... If you read this it means you have build and installed Winland on your computer and successfully initialized SQLite database. Now it is up to you what you gonna do about that :D Have fun!

Well... what was wrong with first approach? The approach itself. Most likely due to some knowledge issues, I made a fundamental mistake by trying to build it in VS. That was wrong.

All dependencies I have (Glib, DBus, GDA, XML, whatever) are built under MinGW so clear should be to build Vinland under MinGW too, but apparently it was clear enough for me.

Last night, just as arrived back home after Midgard Gathering, I took my wife's laptop and after some 3 hours of completinh MinGW installations along with Vinland dependencies I got first running libmidgard2 library with midgard-schema.exe and midgard-query.exe fully operational. No unresolved symbols, no broken references, no crashes at all. However I faced some issues with database creation, I blame the laptop running on Vista (yuk!) so today I started porting it again on my box under XP.

Be sure, that as soon as I get it done, I will post binaries and developers instructions :)

This started a long, storming disussion because of linkink objects problem, multiple indexes and getting rid of local IDs.

In the evening we had some Chinese food and went to bar for some entertainment.

Today we discuessed two more items from agenda: UI changes and Datamanager refactoring. First was about adopting Bespin and/or Ubiquity features to make UI and Admin UI more human language oriented. As it was expected, another hot discussion raised because of different approaches to UI matter presente by many attendees. I prefer approach that we don't surprise end users with nifty gadgets that they are not prepared for. End users tend to expect from web application similar functionality and visual presence as they get from their OS. Besides, no matter how innovative both are, they seem to be limited to Mozilla/Firefox. Anyway we agreed that it may be a worth watching and thinking while both projects get into mature state so that we are not left behind.

Second subject was pretty easy, we all love&hate Datamanager same time. While it facilitates form and data operations, it is also limited by desgin and sometimes brings problems. The main ideas is to refactor DM to rely only on MgdSchema objects and let developer decide what to do with particular fields during runtime. Talking about DM relation to MdgSchema we couldn't miss MgdSchema inheritance which is basically about extending f.ex. midgard_article with solt_article object and benefit directly from midgard_article features and be able to add some more specific functionality designed by developer.

Somewhere around noon most of Finish team had to leave for a ferry back to Finland. We left only four of us: Smallone, Bergie, Piotras and myslef. I took the chance to bug Bergie about running MidCOM 3 aka Midgard MVC on Ragnaroek and started porting this site to Midgard MVC platform.

And of course, yo ucan find some more photos here.

Yesterday we (me nad Piotras) spent almost whole day to get there. Unfortunately, even travelling by plane you need a lot of time to get there. In the evening we had a lovely time at Smallone's tasting delicoius TexMex food prepared by Eva.

Today we followed the agenda guys have written and so far we managed to accept the design for a new Midgard Schema feature - views. From now on, views will be implemented and managed by Midgard core. All you will have to do is add a MgdSchema definition like

<view name="groups_with_coord">
  <property name="guid" from="midgard_group:guid" />
  <property name="official" from "midgard_group:official" />
  <property name="lat" from="org_routa_positiononing_location:lat" />

  <join direction="left" left="midgard_group:guid" right="org_routa_positiononing_location:parentguid" />
  <join direction="inner" left="midgard_group:id" right="midgard_member:gid" />

  <where property="midgard_group:owner" constraint=">" value="0" />
</view>

And this will make MgdSchema to create an object that you will use like regular schema object:

<?php

$qb = new midgard_query_builder("groups_with_coord");
$qb->add_constraint("official","=","My Group");
$rst = $qb->execute();

?>

We also decided about Midgard 9.09 codename which is now "Mjolnir". Mjolnir is Thor's holy hammer, so next Midgard release is expected to be smashing.

Before lunch we had a group photo:

More photos are in my photo stream.

My old friend, Bergie has posted nine days ago, a short info about Jerry and his magnificent finger. I won't retype the story now, because it is not what I wanted to say. Check it yourself later :)

What I wanted to say is that you never know what you can do with your simple note. For what I read, Bergie just commented the fact that some futuristic, aesthetic surgery design has been made while our friend Jerry has it implemented for over a year. As usual it was posted on Bergie's blog with some links in common social communities like Jaiku, Qaiku, Facebook etc. After a day or two we found his note Slashdotted and spread around more and more blogs, news sites etc.

Today, I started my day with opening onet.pl - most popular Polish news portal (or rather whatever portal) and guess what I found in "Tech-news" section. Yes, you bet:

The highlighted item read: "USB memory instead of a finger". Almost sure what I could find there I followed the link and got this:

The article reads that Jerry's got a 2GB USB in his finger and the rest of story we know, but they added that Jerry now works on the second finger edition with extended storage and WiFi connectivity. And guess what... they're quoting BBC!!! So I expect tomorrow Jay Leno will visit Jerry to ask him for the show :)

You were warned. Be careful what you do coz you never know when you end up in CNN Headlines :)

The following write-up is related to latest Ragnaroek version and lives in SVN. Refer to http://trac.midgard-project.org/ to get help on syncing your repository with Midgard SVN.

For end users, editors and site developers it is crucial to know what they can do with given components and libraries. While midcom.admin.help lived there for a quite a time, it wasn't a good tool because it wasn't too handy.

First impression is the most important, therefore index page for help needs to be inviting. Now, it is sufficient to go to Online Help from your floating menu after you were logged in. A new popup windows will open presenting you current component's index page. Current means the one you were in when you hit 'help' button.

Index page shall contain a brief description about what given component does etc. For example:

Developers shall put index.lang.txt file into documentation folder.

Index page shall also contain a Table of Contents. TOC is generated automagically from all files matching name.lang.txt pattern in docs folder plus two special kewyords "MgdSchema classes" and "Routes" which are added to TOC if applicable.

"MgdSchema classes" will list all schemas introduced by a component. The list includes schema names and list of properties with descriptions for each schema.

Developers shall update schema definition files with special 'description' tag for each property:

<property name="topic">
        <description value="Parent midgard_topic ID" />
</property>

Schema list should look like this:

Routes is a artificial help item that shall display all URL routes handled by component. Each route shall provide handler name, controller class name, controller method and a brief description. Any route on the list shall be a link to MidCOM API doc stored at http://www.midgard-project.org/api-docs.

Developers shall add translation strings related to routes description to component's strings database using '{handler}_info' as string identifier. For example, in net.nehmer.blog, for 'ajax-latest' handler it would be 'ajax-latest_info' that would result in:

All remaining help files can have any names as long as they match the pattern name.lang.txt but developers shall remeber to put 'help_name' translation string into at least English component's translation database. To make it easier some common titles like 'help_style' or 'help_schemas' are stored centrally in midcom.admin.help's database.