Linux for Consumers: MeeGo Updates

Excited to see the work happening on the Linux consumer space in the MeeGo Universe. There is now a MeeGo 1.0 download available for everyone to try out.

At Novell we have been contributing code, design and artwork for this new consumer-focused Linux system and today both Michael Meeks and Aaron Bockover blog about the work that they have been doing on MeeGo.

These screenshots are taken directly from Aaron's and Michael's blog posts. Aaron discusses the new UI for the music player Banshee and Michael discusses the new UI for the Email/Calendar program.

Media Panel in MeeGo

You can still get access to the full Banshee UI themed appropriately:

Themed MeeGo UI for Banshee

Check Aaron's blog for the details on the design process and the new features coming out for it.

Then, on the Evolution side of things Michael discusses Evolution Express a renewed effort to make Evolution suitable for netbooks. The work done there is amazing, here are some screenshots:

Evolution Express on MeeGo

Just like Banshee, Evolution now integrates with MeeGo panels, like this:

Summary of your tasks on the MeeGo Panel

This is what the new preferences panel looks like:

Themed MeeGo UI for Banshee

And finally the calendar:

Evolution Express Calendar on MeeGo

Third Party Applications

You can also run existing Mono applications on MeeGo. I give you the photo management application F-Spot:

F-Spot on MeeGo

And this is Jonathan's Pinta painting program built on Mono with Gtk#:

The Mono-based paint program Pinta

Pinta is fascinating as it shows how much punch can be packed by CIL code. Pinta and all of its effects use 328k of disk space and for distribution it only takes 108k of disk space.

Development Tools

And we are of course very happy to be supporting developers that want to target MeeGo using Windows, Mac or Linux with our MonoDevelop plugin for MeeGo.

If you are more of a Visual Studio developer, our upcoming MonoTools for Visual Studio 2.0 will also support developing applications for MeeGo from Windows.

MeeGo

I am blown away by the way that everyone involved in MeeGo has been able to execute on the vision of bringing Linux to the consumer space by the way of the netbook.

Kudos to everyone involved.