Community Highlights for December 2008: Part I

When the Council was first formed, one of the things we decided we were going to do was aggregate community activity to this blog. This was to reduce the workload for people who wanted to track what the community was up to, but didn't have the time to monitor every single channel for updates (the list of which is rather sizable, including Internet Tablet Talk, the mailing lists, #maemo, Planet, the wiki, Bugzilla, Jaiku, and others). Unfortunately, due partially to lack of a structured plan and partially to some lazy fellow council members who I wont name :P, this "aggregation" has been limited to posts from me about things I happen to be interested in (or think need highlighting). Which doesn't include those things that I'm not interested in, or fail my entirely arbitrary relevance test. ;)

So, today we start off on a new foot with real (and hopefully useful) aggregation in the form of a bi-monthly "community highlights" column which will come on the first and third weeks of each month (Part I and Part II).

Mer (formerly Maemo Reconstructed)

Mer started out as Maemo Reconstructed, a proof of concept implementation of "Maemo" (i.e., Hildon) on top of a basic Ubuntu release stripped down to fit into about the same amount of space as Maemo occupies. The goal being to move Maemo away from the "proprietary vendor-rolled firmware" mentality to a more general platform for tablet devices, make in more developer-friendly, and improve Maemo's alignment with upstream (to reduce the number of "Maemoisms" and make porting easier).

Mer is effectively the second step in this process (the renaming solved branding conflicts so Mer could be used as a community distribution of Maemo in the short-term while Nokia figures out what direction it wants to take Maemo in in the long term), and lots of progress has already been made, so be sure to keep an eye on it.

maemo.org server improvements

You may have noticed maemo.org running a lot faster, this is thanks to the Midgard upgrade that was pushed last week. The software is now much gentler on the database, and there have been general improvements in practically every area of Midgard. Thanks to Henri, Niels, and piotras for making the push to get it live!

maemo.org design

Dave, Tim, and Andrew have been working with INdT on the maemo.org redesign over the past few weeks. The plan is to have a new design to implement by December, so get ready for a new look in the next couple months.

Canola in Bugzilla

Canola is now a product in Bugzilla, which marks the first non-Nokia software officially tracked in the maemo.org bugzilla and signifies a milestone in maemo.org's new role as the true home of the Maemo Community. So get to filing bugs! ;)