Developing for MeeGo on MeeGo

When we got to know about the Intel AppUp contest to develop apps for MeeGo OS, we were keen to participate. I first downloaded and installed Meego SDK for Windows on my laptop.

QT Creator is the IDE to code for Meego.We have 2 options to run Meego Code:

1. Emulator (QEMU)
2. Run on a connected Meego Device

Unfortunately, the Emulator ‘Qemu’ was very very slow on my machine, so I shifted to second approach and started executing on Meego device. We have a netbook with Meego OS and we could run code on it via LAN.We found this approach to work better for us.

But soon we faced another problem as more developers were assigned to Meego development. Multiple developers trying to run code on same Meego netbook was not practical. We decided to dual-boot our machines with Meego beside existing Windows OS. Bob Duffy’s blog post helped us in installing Meego on our machines. Meego installation was easy and quick and I was able to boot into Meego in under 20 mins. I really like Meego on my laptop, it boots and shuts down very fast and performs very well when compared to Windows.

Its always a good idea to use and get familiar with a platform before developing for it so using Meego as my primary OS was really helpful. I got a real feel for the OS and its various features.

Now we wanted to install Meego SDK on Meego and we followed instructions from Meego’s official website. We managed to install but somehow QT won’t compile our code. We struggled for days then found this Intel forum discussion which mentioned a few alternate approaches. However those didn’t work for us either. Looks like Meego toolchain keeps changing as its still under development and sometime it breaks a few things.

After trying for a few more days we finally managed to compile on Meego. This approach has a major advantage that you don’t need to use any emulator or a separate Meego device as you can compile and run on the same machine. Here I am including steps to install Meego SDK with QT Creator on Meego Netbook OS incase somebody else is looking to develop for Meego using Meego itself.

You need to first open Terminal application and then run following commands in given sequence. These commands will be downloading and installing various files and tools on your machine so be patient as some commands will take a while to finish.

1. sudo zypper refresh
2. sudo zypper install yum
3. sudo zypper install pattern:development-tools
4. sudo zypper install pattern:x-software-development
5. sudo zypper install qt-creator
6. sudo zypper install qt-devel

After this you should be able to code meego apps in QT creator. As of now AppUp SDk is only available for windows so once we finish coding our Meego Apps we open our same code in Windows QT creator to integrate with AppUp SDK, which is necessary if you want to make your apps available on soon to be launched AppUp for Meego.

We have developed 11 apps for Meego so far. As a trainee, I got an opportunity to develop for Meego. I am really thankful to Sachin Sir for having complete faith in me and for giving me this opportunity.

Exciting journey with MeeGo

I was very excited when I first heard about MeeGo. There are MeeGo devices being commercially distributed and we undertook the development of some really interesting apps. Also, Intel organized contest for rewarding first hundred MeeGo apps and thus came the deadline 1 month 10 apps. Quickly, we took job of installing Qt Creator on our machines. We also dual booted our machines with MeeGo as our default OS and other as Windows.

Installing Qt was comparatively tedious job (may be we were new to this platform). We tried several ways but no luck. Even we called Intel person and asked him for help. After slogging on it, we found solution. We spend couple of days knowing the syntax and UI of Qt. As a team we distributed the work and started working on code.

As the work was progressing, we were enjoying working on MeeGo. We got to know many new concepts. All efforts helped in understanding different aspects of this platform and lot of new ideas came and we implemented. When the apps were near to completion, we used to test it on our new Netbook gifted to our company by Intel.

We worked hard to make sure the apps run best and are liked by the people. Kavita, Aditi and Neha were great help to me. As a trainee, I got an opportunity to know about new technology, MeeGo. Till date, we have developed 9 apps and are planning for more.

PS: Meego is an OS by Intel and our apps will be available for Meego Netbooks via AppUp – the app-store for netbooks and desktops.