Wednesday, May 26, 2010

meego 1.0 is vaguely awesome

people who know me will tell you i'm a bit of a unix(tm) fan. i grew up with it as a developer, cutting my teeth on BSD variants of the late 80's. linux is near and dear to my heart, but getting it to run on laptops has often been a labor of love. but as i get older, i find i want to spend less time monkeying with install weirdness and more time using my computer.

which is why i'm happy to report that meego 1.0 is a bit of a delight to work with. not heard of meego? it's the illicit love-child of intel's moblin effort and nokia's maemo platform. i've been using moblin 2.1 on a dell vostro a90 (aka mini-9) and have found it serviceable, but with a few quirks. meego seems to have improved stability and sound support a bit. but most importantly, it's beginning to feel like a real, usable system.

loading meego is as simple as downloading the image from http://meego.com/, copying it to a flash drive and booting. users of dell mini-9's will encounter a few headaches due to licensing restrictions regarding broadcom's wireless drivers. you'll have to follow the steps outlined at slaine.org to get the wireless driver working correctly.

so, if you have a netbook, you might want to check it out.