Community OBS is live

David Greaves and Niels Breet announced, in their "Community build system" session at the MeeGo Conference, that the community build system is now live. Similar to the combined maemo.org Extras/Packages & auto-builder, one of the advantages it will give is the ability to have Ubuntu PPA-style personal repositories, replacing Extras-devel and reducing the risks of tracking the development of particular pieces of software.

OBS is a build system, originally developed by openSUSE, used by many systems, groups and companies, including the MeeGo project for the official releases. Compared with the "core" MeeGo build system, the community system "serves several purposes: for building standalone applications to run on MeeGo; for building standalone applications to run on the Fremantle and Harmattan distributions; to collaborate on larger projects that are not in MeeGo core; eg ruby" Currently, to use the system you need to have a meego.com username and contact lbt (say on IRC). David and Niels are working on importing Fremantle so that the maemo.org autobuilder can be replaced by a less bespoke system; meaning more functionality and fewer issues. In tests so far, most of the existing Extras build without problem, which bodes well for a trouble-free transition.

MeeGo Conference wrap-up: blog posts & photos

For over five days this week, mobile enthusiasts, developers, bloggers, companies from gadget, Linux, Maemo, Moblin, Qt, MeeGo backgrounds descended on Dublin for the first MeeGo Conference; which replaced the Maemo Summit. With over 1,000 people in attendance; most news (like the giving of a Lenovo IdeaPad S10-t3 to every non-Intel/non-Nokia attendee, and the commitment from AMD to contribute to MeeGo) was quickly plastered all over the Internet.

Your editors, Andrew Flegg and Ryan Abel, were there (and actually met in person for the first time, in over four years of working together) as was the entirety of the recently elected Maemo Community Council (Andrew, Tim Samoff, Attila Csipa, Andrea Grandi, Kathy Smith). The Maemo community was very well-represented, with tens of "big names" such as Dave Neary, Henri Bergius, Andre Klapper, Reggie Suplido, Graham Cobb, Thomas Perl, Gary Birkett and many many more.

The MeeGo wiki is gathering together the thoughts of attendees who have written blog posts (with the message being, "feel free to add your own") and links to photo collections on Twitter and Picasa. The general feeling on the ground, and talking to people afterwards, was that this was exactly the right event to launch MeeGo into the world proper; and the announcement of another conference in San Francisco in May has people already looking forward to the next time the nascent community gets together.

Conference session videos uploaded

If you couldn't attend the MeeGo Conference, you can watch many of the sessions (especially from the first day), streamed over the Internet. More should be available of the next few days.