QA dashboard for MeeGo

A new QA Dashboard is now available on MeeGo.com to help users wishing to track QA activity. Jarno Keskikangas announced it on Friday: QA Dashboard is now available for public use. With QA Dashboard, QA Reports, bug lists and trends can be visualized in order to get an quick overview on current quality and progress. Build your own or share the dashboard with friends just by sending the link to your dashboard. We've quite exited about the dashboard and hope you are, too. Let us know what you think and what kind of information or visualizations would be valuable, and we'll get 'em done. A MeeGo.com account is required for access.

Why the Maemo Community Council aren't the people to come up with the plan to "save" maemo.org

One of your editors, Andrew Flegg, responded to comments on talk.maemo.org to calls that the Community Council come up with a plan to "save" Maemo and maemo.org: Saying "the Council needs to lead us" is entirely missing the point. Someone needs to come up with concrete, viable proposals which can be discussed. The council can assist with the publication and collaboration of that, as - I'm sure - anyone vested in Maemo will also publicise.

Once there is a popular, actionable plan for either of these two items, the council's power is to say "this is the roadmap" and then assist with the publication and collaboration of that, as - I'm sure - anyone vested in Maemo will also publicise. Andrew was one of the original proposers of the Community Council, and has served on it many times.

Brute-force cloning of Maemo 5 repositories shows misunderstanding of Nokia situation

Pali Rohár has started a project to create a set of scripts to mirror maemo.org, starting with the Extras-* repositories. We know that Nokia abandoned Maemo5 and some day Nokia will stop Maemo5 repositories (SDK, apps, extras...). So I'm started creating shell scripts which will backup maemo 5 fremanle repositories (downloads.maemo.nokia.com and repository.maemo.org).

Scripts can also create package index (from repositories) and separate open and closed source. Some info about closed packages wrote Carsten Munk on his page - but it was for PR1.1. I asked him for application which generated his page, but he refuse publish it. So I'm created my own (scripts + wiki page).

Brute force cloning of repositories, rather than rsync/apt-mirror; and even the talk of screen-scraping the wiki suggest that a better approach would be working with the maemo.org maintainers to ensure that access will be available from Nemein in the event of Nokia withdrawing funding. A snapshot now (or, worse, a series of snapshots created by multiple people putting lots of load on the servers) is of little use if funding is withdrawn in a year or two; at which point the community will almost certainly be able to work with Nemein (and probably Nokia) to perform an orderly transition.

maemo.org is far more than a set of repositories and a forum; for example, there are services such as Garage maintaining source code, websites and mailing lists and the autobuilder, which is how the repositories get populated. These two services alone are large, complex and will be difficult to replicate.

Nokia N950 MeeGo device programme extended with 50 further devices

Quim Gil announced that the 250 N950s Nokia provided for allocation through the meego.com device programme had been extended with a further fifty devices. The process is a little different this time, with focus on projects which have code (of some form) already running on a Qt platform: Candidates MUST have real open source code published and functional via Qt Creator simulator/emulator, Scratchbox, running in similar platforms e.g. Maemo, Symbian, Linux desktop... It can be unstable and far from complete, but we want to see real work done already as a primary way to filter candidates. At the time of writing, fifteen are remaining.

Maemo Community Council member SD69 on mobile governance

RM Bauer has, following the announcement of the issues facing apps.meego.org, made a plea to those considering "abandoning" maemo.org on the topic of mobile Linux governance: the decision by LF seems to be a sucker punch to the kidneys of small and individual developers. I was reminded of a debate perpetuated not long ago by those who had espoused the relative openness of MeeGo and encouraged maemo developers to leave Maemo for MeeGo. [...] MeeGo will take mobile linux to new places and should be supported for that. But dare to say that leaving nothing but corporate run app stores is an unnatural and unsustainable state of affairs for an open source project. [...] A maemo.org run by the community would never make such a decision as that announced today. To maemo and other mobile linux developers, to those of you who support open source, those of you who have said maemo is dead, and those of you who have accepted "free" N950s - think carefully, think twice, and please continue to support maemo.org

alan bruce clarifies some of Rob's points: this is a Linux Foundation decision that is hurting Nokia more than developers, and commercial closed source applications won't be hosted on meego.com either. However, MeeGo does have a "governance" problem, as we noted on the front page.

For some things maemo.org is still the best place, but in the long term, maemo.org isn't going to be the home for MeeGo-related efforts, nor will the home of Mobile Linux in general. Ultimately, what it comes down to, is that open source is about the people, and people will go wherever best fits their interests whether that place will be the home of the community for a discontinued Nokia platform is up to them.

Help with mobile usability tests

On the maemo-developer mailing list Jarkko Palokangas looks for volunteer users to take part in a usability study for his Master's thesis. Requirements for users is that they got Nokia N900 device and internet connection. Tests are conducted in English. It is also desirable that the user has no or very little earlier experience about gPodder application.

User's task is to go through test cases and speak aloud all their feelings and thoughts at the same time. Interested users can contact Jarkko at the email address provided in the link,