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Mer/Releases/0.11

Mer 0.11 was prepared in the sprint 16. March 2009 - 30 March 2009 with a testing period: 30 March 2009 - 6 April 2009. If you want help with the release, show up in #mer on IRC, on irc.freenode.net.

Call for developer participation

There will be a Maemo/Mozilla hackfest in Copenhagen (Mozilla Maemo Danish Wekeend), Saturday-Sunday 30-31 May 2009 (with party Friday 29 May), where Mer is one of the focus areas as well. As it is a hackfest the focus will be more on coding than on presentations. From Mer project so far Stskeeps will be attending.

If you have the time and ability to show up (there might be an option of sponsorship) and ability to push some code or artwork or other things through and help out - do show up, it'll be a blast and will bring us closer to Mer 1.0. We hope to establish a IRC presence as well if you want to contribute remotely.

Focus area from Mer project point of view will be a wekeend focused on getting Mer ready for day-to-day usage (1.0), both logistically (repositories, restricted builders, etc) and user interface (control panels, getting audio to work on N8x0, and so forth).

More information can be found here

Press coverage of Mer

• Linux Weekly News
• LinuxDevices article
• Heise Online, German
• Heise Online, Polish

Notable accomplishments and news

• wazd is now mentor for the UI/Artwork component
• Meizirkki is now mentor for the Testing component
• New UI based on wazd's ideas from his blog, screenshot. The top bar consists of Application Launcher, Menu button (for your current running application's menu), Quick application switcher, System tray, and task switcher and closer (the globe, shows up when >0 apps are open)
• Maemo-launcher (the GTK booster, etc) actually works now, reducing RAM usage and making Mer usable on 770 and faster everywhere.
• Collected Mer artwork Mer/Artwork here. License is Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, author is Andrew Zhilin.
• 770 wifi module patches to support WPA, IW wireless extensions
• Removed docpurge (no more apt-get dist-upgrade messups)
• Removed extras-repository to make way for Mer's own development for now.
• Work on cross compiler for Ubuntu Jaunty/ARM, http://zenvoid.org/software/cross-compiler/
• Began work on port to Neo Freerunner (thanks to eshopen.com)
• Bug that kept N810 keymaps from working now fixed.
• Special Mer kernels with useful patches - OTG device whitelisting, add pH5's patch to change opmode on the fly, fanoush's patch to remove "menelaus: Setting voltage..." messages in dmesg, fanoush's patch which correctly gives device nodes for mmcs on N810, rndispatch, jott's rotation and a quickie patch of mine to remove "EAC mode..." messages from dmesg (RNDIS means USBnet on your XP)
• We have begun to look into OpenSUSE Build Service (which is not OpenSUSE specific). They have revolutionized cross-compilation. Instead of how Scratchbox did it, taking user mode ARM emulation and patching it with native packages until it somewhat worked, they have fixed the user mode ARM emulation and then accelerated just gcc, m4 and bash.

Known issues

• home applets behave oddly when in non-800x480
• Screen should not dim and turn off during first boot wizard
• Magic X menu stretches too far, before adding v ^ buttons.
• Happens occasionally: Initial configuration - Root Password Confirmation Prompt - No virtual keyboard
• X driver for omapfb does not use Manual updates yet and hence can be a bit slow in updating the screen which may give the impression the system is slow.
• Rotation in advanced-backlight kills the X server
• Duplicate application menu happens
• Network-Manager dies on N8x0 after sleep / idling
• No charging screen on flashable image
• No battery meter yet on tablets.
• No sound on tablets.
• modifying panel settings causes X to sometimes crash to tty
• 770 rescue menu does not seem to work (keys doesn't work)
• 770 doesn't pick up correct RTC, or it doesn't have it set
• Control panel may appear to have no menu but it actually doesn't have one.
• Can not enter an address in hildon-application-manager

Disclaimer

• There is -no- warranty. This may blow up your MMC, steal your wife or cause doomsday to come around. But if you find some bugs, please report them on bugs.maemo.org and we'll try to see what we can do to fix the bug causing it.
• If anything goes wrong, grab a USB cable, and rescue mode is done through holding down Home key when booting Mer (on tablets)

Installation guide

Installation guide can be found here, including link to Mer installer for N8x0

Released images