MeeGo and The MeeGo Conference 2010.

I was at the MeeGo Conference in Dublin. We were very busy from the first minute we arrived there until the last day we came back, and it was pretty productive.

But, what is MeeGo?
For those of you who do not know about MeeGo (taken from the Meego project Website):
"MeeGo is an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed up by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open source activity. MeeGo integrates the experience and skills of two significant development ecosystems, versed in communications and computing technologies. The MeeGo project believes these two pillars form the technical foundations for next generation platforms and usages in the mobile and device platforms space."

What was the conference about? 
Sunday:
We arrived at the airport and went straight to the hotel, where we left all our stuff. Then, we decided to go for a walk to the center and try some Irish specialities. The center of Dublin is quite lovely!

Back to the hotel, we decided to go to the Aviva Stadium, where the conference was taking place (yes, in such an unusual and great location). There was a lot of work to be done before everything was prepared for the next day, so we helped a bit on this before we all went to bed.

Monday:
We started the day having a great Irish breakfast all together at the hotel and then went straight to the Stadium.

The whole morning was busy with Keynotes where AMD announced that it was joining the The Linux Foundation’s MeeGo project, and Intel announced that all Meego Conference's attendees would get a Lenovo s10-3t tablet netbook.

In the early evening I attended some different talks. I started with "Meego Infrastructure", where OBS (openSUSE build service) was introduced and followed with "Meego on BeagleBoard", which was interesting but I missed some practical or "in use" example. Afterwards, I went to some other talks about learning from past mistakes and designing Meego apps (which were not really focused on Meego).

In the evening, after a nice reception organized by Novell and doing some networking, the whole Openismus' crew went out together for dinner.

Tuesday:
We woke up very early to avoid the crowd and got tickets for the football match (Ireland vs. Norway) on Wednesday evening (courtesy of the organisation as well). We got those very easily but for the netbooks we had to stay in the queue a little bit longer. Once we got them , the organization gave us a pendrive with Meego OS on it, for a "do it yourself" installation·. I must admit, that I was kind of surprised when I turned the netbook on and saw that Windows 7 was installed on it... I would have expected some Open Source OS at least.

Some hours later, I got to know a Nokia representative who I talked with, about the new Qt mini project I am currently working on. Showing interest on it, he gave me an N900 in order to test on the device. What a day of presents!

I spent the rest of the day attending different talks. The ones I especially enjoyed were those based on designing apps for Meego devices and the ones focused on OBS, for instance, "Rolling your first package in the openSUSE Build Service (OBS)".

To finish  the day, a party at the Guinness Storehouse was organized for the evening.

Wednesday:
This was an unconferenced day, so anybody who wanted to give a talk, could book his/her slot on a public board and just present it. The most interesting talk of the day was definitely LibreOffice's talk.

We spent the rest of the evening in the football match, well, I spent just the first part of the game watching it. Since I am not a football fan, I decided to spend the rest of the time inside chatting with some people. Norway won!

What did I learn and what are my impressions?
Although this is a very young project and there is still much work to be done, I had a good impression about the way it is developing and the whole infrastructure and organization behind it.

From the conference, I can say that there is a positive feeling and collaboratively-working community surrounding this new born and helping to make it grow strong. It fed more than enough attendees's curiosity concerning Qt Quick and OBS as well, the two star technologies in this project. Since MeeGo targets a wide variety of devices, they need very flexible developing technologies supporting them, and therefore,  a large number of talks were focused on this two subjects.

I am very optimistic about this. Let's stay with our eyes wide open observing and contributing to make this baby grow up healthy!

Interesting links:
MeeGo Conference session videos.
MeeGo Conference 2011.