Mer/About

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The goals of Mer include:
The goals of Mer include:
* Integrate the best solutions for a wide variety of small form-factor devices
* Integrate the best solutions for a wide variety of small form-factor devices
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* Open access to the capabilities these devices offer
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* Encourage wider access to device capabilities through the Vendor Social Contract
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* Enable hardware to be useful even after manufacturer updates cease
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* Demonstrably provide an easy route to market for vendors
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* Provide an open foundation that demonstrably provides an easy route to market for vendors such as SmartQ
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* Dramatically reduce costs to vendors of supporting EOL hardware
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* Drive the Vendor Social Contract
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* Focus, harness and support community contributions to the platform
* Focus, harness and support community contributions to the platform
* Encourage and ease migration of existing applications
* Encourage and ease migration of existing applications

Revision as of 09:17, 25 June 2009

Mer

Background

Mer is a new operating system for small, mobile touch-screen devices.

It is Linux based and layers the best open-source elements of Nokia's Maemo platform over a modern Ubuntu base.

The goals of Mer include:

  • Integrate the best solutions for a wide variety of small form-factor devices
  • Encourage wider access to device capabilities through the Vendor Social Contract
  • Demonstrably provide an easy route to market for vendors
  • Dramatically reduce costs to vendors of supporting EOL hardware
  • Focus, harness and support community contributions to the platform
  • Encourage and ease migration of existing applications
  • Support experimentation, innovation and development

Mission

Mer platform development will be done in the open, with public SCM repository, bugtrackers, and Wiki-based blueprint discussion.

We should stop seeing the tablets as strictly under-powered embedded systems, and see them for what they really are: powerful, power-efficient, economical handheld computers.

Status

Mer is new and constantly developing so the status of support for hardware and applications is steadily improving.

History

Mer has evolved from discussion around reconstructing Maemo and a desire to make a proof of concept system of these thoughts. The M-R PoC developed into Mer after it was realised that it was - indeed - a viable environment for both developers and end-users.

Screenshots

You can see the current release screenshots here