FAQ

Mer Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mer, and how can I learn more about it?

Mer is a free software and open source, open governance project focused on creating a core GNU/Linux stack for rapid development of embedded & mobile GNU/Linux based systems. The aim of Mer is to help vendors quickly create a basic GNU/Linux environment, which can then be adapted to their hardware and user interface requirements. There are currently 302 packages that comprise Mer, and they are derived from MeeGo core. You can learn more about the project by asking questions using a web IRC chat interface.

What does Mer mean for End-Users?

Mer is intended to be used directly by system integrators and hardware developers and only indirectly by normal end-users. Since Mer is derived from MeeGo, Mer is already capable of addressing the end-users that would use MeeGo, but projects dedicated to specific user-interface layers have not yet been formally organized, so the user-interface demonstrations of Mer are currently only demonstrations. Currently, the most active informal user-interface layer and hardware adaptation is the Nemo Mobile for the Nokia N900/N950/N9. Another active hardware adaptation is the Raspberry Pi adaptation.

What does Mer mean for MeeGo-community developers?

While Tizen offers "membership in most project teams (Release Engineering, QA, Program Management, etc.) ... to people at companies who are building products based on Tizen," Mer aims to be open to participation on a merit basis and to be openly developed and governed as a meritocracy. Mer is currently comprised of 302 packages derived from MeeGo Core, and since Tizen will also derive from MeeGo, Mer aims to remain compatible with Tizen and share as much code with Tizen as possible once the source code for Tizen is released.

What documentation is available to help me start development on Mer?

Because the Mer project is new, documentation is still being developed, and some questions can only be answered by asking in the Mer IRC channel. At this point, there is a FakeOBS for building a Mer system. For application development, please see the MeeGo Community Edition for the Nokia N900/N950/N9, which is a user-interface layer that is compatible with Mer.

Will Mer provide GTK or .deb packages or [some other feature]?

In order to be sustainable, Mer needs to focus development effort on adapting MeeGo, which does not provide these features. Even so, other efforts have coalesced around Mer to provide certain features that are possible with Mer but require extra developer time. Cordia Hildon-Desktop is a distribution that uses Mer as an upstream and provides a GTK Hildon desktop in the spirit of Maemo. Please use the Mer IRC channel to discuss development effort towards implementing new features.

Can I install Mer on device X ?

Instead of Mer core, you probably want to install one the projects that use Mer as base, since in those projects usually target is to provide a complete OS with UI and HW adaptation. See Community Workspace for information about available user experiences and HW adaptations. As explained in #What does Mer mean for End-Users, Mer itself is not targeted for end-users, so installing it makes only sense if you are developing Mer or porting the core itself to a new platform.

What license(s) is Mer under

Mer itself does not impose any particular license to the packages it is composed of. The packages use various FOSS licenses such as GPL, LGPL, BSD, and MIT. For details you can query lisences on Mer based image with: "rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME} has license(s): %{LICENSE}\n'"