Community release of hildon-desktop, and promise of Maemo 5 community SSU
As Nokia winds down its N900 support the community will need to step up to provide its own. Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh has done just that, releasing a number of core Maemo 5 packages with updates developed by Nokia since PR1.2, but not yet introduced in "PR1.3". His particular prompt was a change to the scrolling behaviour of the applications menu: Many (including me) were particularly annoyed with the introduction of the PR1.2 menu, which had slower (much slower) kinetic scrolling. Here's a modified hildon-desktop package which has this reversed, and includes all fixes post PR1.2 (call UI glitching etc...). He goes on to say, later in the thread, that he is preparing a proper community updates repo, similar to the Maemo 4 one from Lucas Maneos. This would provide both an interim release before PR1.3 is released (if it is) and an ongoing home for community-driven updates to Maemo 5.
Community Council election time again
One of your editors, Andrew Flegg, as Maemo Community Council chair, gets to announce the next date for elections to the community facilitation group. Every six months the community chooses five members to represent itself to Nokia, the outside world and coordinate internal activities where desired and/or necessary. Voting will be open for a week, and its last day will be Wednesday, 22nd September 2010. Nominations open this Thursday. Before then community members should be considering whether they want to stand. When nominations open, you can nominate someone via an email to maemo-community (which they must reply to to accept) or you can put your own hat into the ring by emailing the same list. A further announcement will be made when nominations open, with more information. The next council, like the current one, will still be coordinating community activities during the transition to MeeGo. Some things are much firmer than they were six months ago (no bulk move of everyone to meego.com from maemo.org; MeeGo's Handset UX does run on the N900; no commercial grade offering of MeeGo (or Harmattan) for the N900 from Nokia), but the future of the maemo.org community is still dependent on whether MeeGo-Harmattan "Hacker Edition" becomes a realistic day-to-day OS for N900 owners, and whether or not a community of developers and users gather around it.