MeeGo

Out with the Slow

I've been running Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my HP Mini 110, from 10.04 then onto Unity with 10.10, 11.04. I really like Unity. It is clean and simple and pretty for a small netbook. However, upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04 saw a distinct performance hit. Start-up was so slow. Once started it was acceptably responsive. You really needed to be patient with the slow start-up, and worse, the even slower login. Those using MS-Windows may not have noticed anything, but seasoned Linux users would. What to do? I shut-down unnecessary services. Still no noticeable improvement. This is using SSD! How can it be so slow? Once logged in the network was available. But that was the only benefit. Time to try something new.

A new chapter

Good device support There are Linux choices for netbooks. You could even run a standard desktop and configure for the small form factor. That is small screen and small keyboard. After some thought, these are my requirements:

• Minimal setup
• Optimal use of small screen 
• Easy upgrade path 

Easy, right? Well, sort of. There were three distributions that looked interesting,

• Joli OS
• MeeGo
• xPUD

Once I read that MeeGo was hosted by the Linux Foundation I decided to give that a go. You see I'm a member so it's best to support the people you, well, support!

The Meego v1.2 for Netbooks was a heavy weight download at 900MB. But it looked like it had everything I needed out the box. I was also mesmerised by the promise of really fast boot-up and resume times.

The installation was simple and uncomplicated, but I fully expected to have download and install several 100MB more of updates. Not so! But there were problems. The installation notes were spot on in there known issues and workarounds. There other problem: no wireless. A quick google search found an excellent write-up written by Glen Gray here. The steps are,

1. Activate the MeeGo toolbar and select the applications icon
2. Choose the Accessories section and select Terminal (or type terminal in the search box)
3. Install the various tools you will need
   sudo zypper install rpmdevtools
4. Install the compilers and other toolssudo zypper install pattern:meego-development-tools
5. Install the kernel-netbook-devel package
   sudo zypper install kernel-devel
6. Now we’re ready to build and install the new broadcom drivers, my moblin srpm works
wget http://slaine.org/meego/releases/1.2/ia32/source/wl-kmod-5.100.82.38-1.src.rpm
   (This build will download the broadcom driver archive directly from their site)
rpmbuild --rebuild --target=i586 wl-kmod-5.100.82.38-1.src.rpm
7. Install the resulting rpm
   sudo rpm -ivh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/i586/wl-kmod-5.100.82.38-1.i586.rpm
8. Loading the modulesudo modprobe -a wl
9. You should be able to now connect to a network

On restart I was able to connect.

Packages

MeeGo is RPM based system using the zypper package manager. I've not used an RPM based system in a very long time. So I will have to learn once again how to,

Update a system

zypper up

Search for a package

zypper se [package name]

Install a package

zypper in [package name]

And all those other things you do with packages.

Am I Happy?

It will take a little getting used to a new desktop, but so far, yes I am happy with the outcome. It is fast, it was easy to setup and easy to customise. I love the full screen windows. I love the speed. I love the consistent configuration. I will get re-familiar with working with RPM packages. After all, it is good to know how to do things using the two principle Linux package managers. It might even be fun to do a side by side comparison for common package tasks ...