Questions have been raised in the MeeGo community recently over the support for Microsoft's NTFS. Clearly, support for this in end-user MeeGo netbooks would be expected as this is often the file system that external hard drives are shipped with. Therefore, in the interests of interoperability, consumers should expect MeeGo to work with such devices. The lack of support was recently raised as a bug in the MeeGo community, to which the response that productised installs may have a licensed NTFS driver added on top of the open source core, but that NTFS support would not be added to MeeGo Core OS. Read on for more.

Nokia today announced the release of the Qt 1.1 SDK Technology Preview. The new SDK, based on Qt 4.7, is a merge of the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 and the previous Qt SDK. The release gives developers an early opportunity to familiarise themselves with the next version of the SDK. A key theme of the release is to allow developers to easily get started with Qt Quick development on Symbian, Maemo 5 and the desktop. The new SDK also makes it easier for Symbian developers to use native APIs in their code.

Here is a heads-up to anyone who uses the formerly WRT based Twitter client, TwimGo, on their N900. The author Tommi Laukkanen (@tlaukkanen), as moved development of his comprehensive Twitter application to the Qt QML framework. This means that we can hope to see it released for MeeGo and even perhaps Symbian^3. This is yet another great example of what can be achieved with the Qt framework. As seen in the video below (click through from front page), the 3D-like transitions are smooth and fast on the N900, with no discernible penalty for the overhead of Qt.

I'd like to draw your attention to blog post by a MeeGo community manager Jarkko Moilanen (aka kyb3R). This is a great story of how someone with an interest in the Hacker culture, and a background in attending Ubuntu LUGs went on to be responsible for building the "MeeGo Network Fi", the Finnish community for MeeGo development. In the post he explains how events unfolded for him to be in his current position, and the things that worked well, and not so well. I would rate this as a must read for anyone aspiring to form their own regional MeeGo group.

[December] The Meego technical steering group have announced a new policy for dealing with the increasing backlog of vendor-contributed kernel patches relevant to MeeGo waiting to be added upstream. Each of these vendors accumulated hundreds of patches which made managing the MeeGo kernel impractical. To remedy this, the new policy requires specific compliance from vendors, and will entail maintaining a "reference kernel", which closely matches the upstream Linux kernel. Read on for more analysis.

Developers looking to experiment with the latest Qt Mobility API should direct their attention to Nokia's Qt Labs, where a technology preview release of Qt Mobility 1.2 was announced during the Christmas break. The primary focus of the 1.2 release is delivering backend support for MeeGo. However, there are also some new features, which will be of interest to both MeeGo and Symbian developers. A beta release of Qt Mobility 1.2 will follow this technology preview at the end of January.

Significant updates to MeeGo and the MeeGo SDK have been announced at the MeeGo Wiki. Both MeeGo Core and Netbook have received updates in both the 1.1 and 1.0 branches, receiving their second and sixth updates respectively. The MeeGo 1.1 SDK has been updated to verson 1.1.2 which includes accelerated graphics performance for Linux QEMU VM, and numerous of bug fixes. More details were not available at the time of writing. Read on for more details about the Core and Netbook updates.

In anticipation of a new browser coming to Symbian^3, it's time to do a little hypothetical thinking about the browsing scene on Symbian. In this editorial, I consider the case for Nokia cooperating with the Mozilla Foundation, for Fennec to be shipped with Symbian devices. This is of course blue sky thinking, as Web is deeply integrated into Symbian and Nokia have already said the future of the Symbian browser is Qt Webkit based. Despite that, there is an interesting, theoretical, case to be made, which I explore in this editorial. Whether you agree or not, read on to see what you make of my arguments - comments are invited.

There is a new guide on the MeeGo Wiki detailing how to install the MeeGo handset image onto the new MeeGo-powered WeTab. The WeTab is one of the few devices seen since late last year running a bespoke MeeGo UI, and is an 11.6" multi-touch tablet device. The WeTab is only available through a handful of retail chains in Europe, so the risk of bricking the WeTab in this process should be seriously considered . Only recommend for developers and the most enthusiastic of testers. Thanks to Quim Gil for the heads up on this one.

As the momentum builds towards releases of MeeGo devices, TechRadar has taken a look at MeeGo on a an MSI netbook. It's  a very brief review, but encouraging to see other technology blogs start to pay more attention to the new platform. Of course, the netbook UI of MeeGo is still strongly influenced by its Moblin heritage, rather Nokia's Maemo. As TechRadar run through the various zones of MeeGo, they explain why they think this is a much compelling netbook operating system than its competitor, Google Chrome.