June 01, 2010, 10:05 AM —
Back in mid-May, I raised the question about the status of MeeGo, the embedded platform being developed by Intel and Nokia, and stewarded by the Linux Foundation. Since then, MeeGo 1.0 was released, and when I took a look at the development platform and found the work still unfinished, but encouraging.
At the time, I was interested in how the major Linux distributors were working with MeeGo, since Ubuntu's adoption of the Unity interface for its netbook edition seemed to preclude continued use of its Moblin remix. It turned out that for now, Canonical is not planning on a future Moblin/MeeGo remix, unless there's a demand. Fedora, on the other hand, is steadfastly behind the project--which makes sense, since MeeGo is ultimately based on Fedora.
Keen observers might have noticed that Novell's comments were curiously absent. Did I forget them? No, they told me that they had something in the works, and I needed to stand by. Today, the question of Novell's continued support of MeeGo was answered with an announcement from Computex in Taiwan that they will release SUSE MeeGo "as a fully supported operating system for netbooks."
In their press release, Novell did not cite specific hardware offerings that will ship with MeeGo, but they "[expect] SUSE MeeGo to be pre-installed on a variety of devices from Original Equipment Manufacturers... in the next twelve months."
So there you have it--while Canonical seems to be moving away from MeeGo as an interface, both Fedora and Novell/openSUSE are still firmly committed.
Now let's see what the hardware will look like. If there are solid offerings soon, then I give MeeGo higher hopes for success.
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