This entry will show off a new cute thing, while also being a pretty shameless call for help 🙂

Last couple of days i was playing with the MeeGo sdk, it’s still a very young system but is really interesting (probably also exactly -because- it’s so young)

After installing the meego atom image on a netbook (by basically copying everything by hand, don’t think there is already an automated installation procedure yet?) and after updating all the packages I noticed at the current stage there indeed -is- a working X11 on it, so the subsequent step was quite obvious of course 🙂

The setup of the main SDK on the development machine as described on their wiki is really straightforward, so having a complete chrooted build environment is a matter of a moment.

Then i started to build a trunk version of KDE… almost all packages -required- for a build are already available (and recent enough 🙂 in the standard MeeGo repository, so I did a pretty basic build (with optional stuff kept to the minimum, will be important to decide carefully what would or would not be included in a build for that, since is targeting mostly low power mobile devices)

The result can be seen in this video (of course with Plasma Netbook shell, since we are on a particular environment like that)

As a side note on this video, is also show some new features of the Plasma Netbook shell in the upcoming KDE SC 4.5, but this is another story 🙂 (will do screencasts on those shortly)

OGG version

It can be seen that the boot is really really fast, and the performance is quite good too. It is significantly faster than on an older X11 on the same machine, however there are still some graphics glitches (not present on OpenSuse on the same machine) But I’m confident all of this will be gone on a new release of video drivers/X11/Qt (we have been here some times already after all :))

So, moral of the story, this shows KDE libraries and apps can be build really quickly there, they can work really well and that is the platform where some of our new projects can really shine, like the Netbook, the Mobile and the Mediacenter shells. Now think about for instance remote widgets between a mediacenter and a phone, or a phone and a netbook, just to name some of our technologies that would really come to full potential when having them on different devices

So, if you know how to do -good quality- packages, (that honestly, is really -not- my expertise :)), maybe already involved in the MeeGo packaging effort, some help will be really really appreciated, it would be really cool to set up a repository that people can use to quickly install a whole KDE stack on a (at the moment still text mode only) MeeGo install