Introduction to the MeeGo Software Platform

On February 15, 2010, the world's largest chip manufacturer, Intel, and the world's largest mobile handset manufacturer, Nokia, announced joining their existing open-source projects (Moblin and Maemo, respectively) to form a new project called MeeGo, hosted at the Linux Foundation. This article provides an introduction to the MeeGo Project, a brief overview of the MeeGo architecture, the benefits the MeeGo platform offers to various players in the ecosystem and discusses the role of the Linux Foundation as the project's host.

MeeGo is a Linux-based platform that is capable of running on multiple computing devices, including handsets, Netbooks, tablets, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. The primary goal of the Maemo and Moblin Projects' merger was to unify the Moblin and Maemo communities' efforts and enable a next-generation open-source Linux platform suited for a variety of client devices. Most important, MeeGo will be doing this while maintaining freedom for innovation, continuing the tradition of community involvement (inherited from Maemo and Moblin), accelerating time to market for a new set of applications, services and user experiences.

With the merger, the MeeGo Project has the opportunity to expand market opportunities significantly on a wide range of devices. It also will provide a rich cross-platform development environment, so applications can span multiple platforms. Additionally, it will unify developers, providing a wealth of applications and services. Such opportunities were out of reach for Maemo and Moblin individually. MeeGo will support multiple chip architectures (ARM and x86). Furthermore, with hundreds of developers working in the open on upstream projects first, from which MeeGo will be based, other mobile Linux platforms will benefit from MeeGo's contributions.

MeeGo provides a full open-source software stack from the core operating system up to the user interface libraries and tools. Furthermore, it offers user experience (UX) reference implementations and allows proprietary add-ons to be added by vendors to support hardware, services or customized user experiences. Figure 1 illustrates the MeeGo architecture, which is divided into three layers:

A detailed discussion of the MeeGo software platform is available at meego.com/developers/MeeGo-architecture.

Figure 1. MeeGo Component-Level Architecture Diagram

As mentioned earlier, the Netbook UX was the first reference implementation of a UX to become available for MeeGo. It delivers a wealth of Internet, computing and communication experiences with rich graphics, multitasking and multimedia capabilities, and it's highly optimized for power and performance. You can download the MeeGo Netbook images from meego.com, and run MeeGo on your Netbook. Figure 2 shows a screenshot of the Netbook UX featuring the MeeGo MyZone (the home screen).

Figure 2. Screenshot of the MeeGo Netbook UX, Featuring the MyZone Home Screen (Source: MeeGo.com)