![Middleware Schema](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Middleware_Schema.svg)
Mer was a
free and open-source software distribution, targeted at hardware vendors to serve as a
middleware
Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue".
Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement c ...
for
Linux kernel-based mobile-oriented
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
s. It is a
fork
In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...
of
MeeGo
MeeGo is a discontinued Linux distribution hosted by the Linux Foundation, using source code from the operating systems Moblin (produced by Intel) and Maemo (produced by Nokia). Primarily targeted at mobile devices and information appliances ...
.
Goals
Some goals
of the project are:
* Openly developed with transparency built into the fabric of the project
* Provide a mobile device oriented architecture
* Primary customers are mobile device vendors, not end-users.
* Have structure, processes and tools to make life easy for device manufacturers
* Support innovation in the
mobile OS space
* Inclusive of projects and technologies (e.g.
MeeGo
MeeGo is a discontinued Linux distribution hosted by the Linux Foundation, using source code from the operating systems Moblin (produced by Intel) and Maemo (produced by Nokia). Primarily targeted at mobile devices and information appliances ...
,
Tizen,
Qt,
Enlightenment Foundation Libraries
The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) are a set of graphics libraries that grew out of the development of Enlightenment, a window manager and Wayland compositor. The project's focus is to make the EFL a flexible yet powerful and easy to ...
(EFL),
HTML5
HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...
)
* Governed as a
meritocracy
* Run as a non profit through donations
Software architecture
![Free and open-source-software display servers and UI toolkits](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Free_and_open-source-software_display_servers_and_UI_toolkits.svg)
Mer is not an
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
; it is aimed to be one component of an operating system based on the Linux kernel. Mer is a part of the
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
above the
Linux kernel and below the
graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...
(GUI).
Mer just provides the equivalent of the MeeGo core. The former MeeGo user interfaces and hardware adaptation are to be done by various other projects and by hardware manufacturers, which will be able to build their products on top of the Mer core.
Components
There is support for
systemd,
Wayland,
Hybris, and other current
FOSS
Fos or FOSS may refer to:
Companies
* Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company
*Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway
* Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company
Historic houses
* Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), Unite ...
software.
Zephyr is an attempt at creating a stack for use by other projects to be exploring lightweight, high-performance, next-generation UIs based on Mer,
Qt5,
QML
QML (Qt Modeling Language) is a user interface markup language. It is a declarative language (similar to CSS and JSON) for designing user interface–centric applications. Inline JavaScript code handles imperative aspects. It is associated wi ...
Compositor and Wayland.
Weston
Weston may refer to:
Places Australia
* Weston, Australian Capital Territory, a suburb of Canberra
* Weston, New South Wales
* Weston Creek, a residential district of Canberra
* Weston Park, Canberra, a park
Canada
* Weston, Nova Scotia
* ...
1.3, which was released on 11 October 2013, supports libhybris, making it possible to use
Android device drivers with Wayland.
Supported hardware
Mer can be compiled for a number of
instruction sets such as
x86
x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...
,
ARM
In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...
or
MIPS.
There are Mer-based builds available for various devices, including
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi () is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic ...
,
Beagleboard
The BeagleBoard is a low-power open-source single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-Key and Newark element14. The BeagleBoard was also designed with open source software development in mind, and as a way of de ...
,
Nokia N900
The Nokia N900 is a smartphone made by Nokia. It supersedes the Nokia N810. Its default operating system, Maemo 5, is a Linux-based OS originally developed for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It is the first Nokia device based upon the Texas ...
,
Nokia N950,
Nokia N9
The Nokia N9 (codename '' Lankku'') is a flagship smartphone developed by Nokia, running on the Linux-based MeeGo mobile operating system. Announced in June 2011 and released in September, it was the first and only device from Nokia with MeeGo, ...
and for various
Intel Atom
Intel Atom is the brand name for a line of IA-32 and x86-64 instruction set ultra-low-voltage processors by Intel Corporation designed to reduce electric consumption and power dissipation in comparison with ordinary processors of the Intel Co ...
-based tablets. These also include hardware adaptation packages and various UXes running on top of Mer, provided by different projects. They can be flashed on the device and might work in dual-boot mode with the original firmware.
Mer uses
Open Build ServiceOBS in merbut wit
one repository per architecture
Products based on Mer
KDE Plasma Active
Mer was used as a reference platform for
KDE's Plasma Active.
Vivaldi Tablet and Improv-computer
In January 2012 a Plasma Active-tablet device, initially known as 'Spark tablet' and soon renamed 'Vivaldi Tablet', was announced. Based on the
Allwinner A20
Allwinner Technology Co., Ltd is a fabless semiconductor company that designs mixed-signal systems on a chip (SoC). The company is headquartered in Zhuhai, Guangdong, China. It has a sales and technical support office in Shenzhen, Guangdong, a ...
SoC, it would have a 7" multitouch display, run the Plasma Active user interface on top of Mer, and have a target price of about €200. The project encountered some problems when its hardware partner in China completely changed the internal components and was reluctant to release the kernel source for the new hardware. As of early July 2012, the Vivaldi had been set back, but a solution was "in the pipes", according to Plasma developer Aaron Seigo. As a kind of side project Improv-computer was targeted for developers and was to be released in January 2014, Mer preinstalled. In mid 2014 both projects were discontinued.
Nemo Mobile
Parallel to
Sailfish OS
Sailfish OS is a Linux-based operating system based on free software, and open source projects such as Mer as well as including a closed source UI. The project is being developed by the Finnish company Jolla.
The OS first shipped with the ...
by
Jolla
Jolla Oy (sometimes referred to as Jolla Ltd.) is a Finnish technology company; vendor and developer of Sailfish OS. Headquartered in Tampere, Finland, Jolla has its own research and development offices in Helsinki, Tampere and Cyberport, Hong ...
, Nemo Mobile is a community-driven operating system based on a Linux kernel, Mer, a GUI and diverse applications.
Since 2019, Nemo Mobile is no longer using Mer Project as a base but switched to
Manjaro Linux
Manjaro ( ) is a free and open-source Linux distribution based on the Arch Linux operating system that has a focus on user-friendliness and accessibility. It uses a rolling release update model and Pacman as its package manager. It is develope ...
. The main reason for the move was obsolete components, like Qt version 5.6 due to licensing restrictions.
Jolla and Sailfish OS
In July 2012
Jolla
Jolla Oy (sometimes referred to as Jolla Ltd.) is a Finnish technology company; vendor and developer of Sailfish OS. Headquartered in Tampere, Finland, Jolla has its own research and development offices in Helsinki, Tampere and Cyberport, Hong ...
, a Finnish company founded by former Nokia employees involved in MeeGo development, announced their work on a new operating system called
Sailfish OS
Sailfish OS is a Linux-based operating system based on free software, and open source projects such as Mer as well as including a closed source UI. The project is being developed by the Finnish company Jolla.
The OS first shipped with the ...
, which is based on MeeGo and Mer's core with added proprietary GUI and hardware implementation layers. It was presented in late November 2012. Jolla released its first
smartphone using Sailfish in 2013, simply called
Jolla
Jolla Oy (sometimes referred to as Jolla Ltd.) is a Finnish technology company; vendor and developer of Sailfish OS. Headquartered in Tampere, Finland, Jolla has its own research and development offices in Helsinki, Tampere and Cyberport, Hong ...
. In October 2014 Jolla announced for May 2015 the Jolla Tablet with Sailfish OS 2.0 which is to be 64-bit on
quadcore Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
CPU. Also 2.0 is ready for licensing, hence it is used with products like
Aqua Fish by Intex and
PuzzlePhone.
Yuanxin OS
In November 2014, Yuanxin Technology in China announced it is working on Yuanxin OS. The company's president Shi Wenyong called the OS "China's own smartphone OS", to be on par with Android and Apple iOS. Mr. Shi explained to a reporter that Yuanxi OS is based on the Mer distribution.
History
![Mer and mobile operating systems](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Mer_and_mobile_operating_systems.svg)
Mer's initial aim to provide a completely free alternative to the
Maemo
Maemo is a software platform originally developed by Nokia, now developed by the community, for smartphones and Internet tablets. The platform comprises both the Maemo operating system and SDK. Maemo played a key role in Nokia's strategy to c ...
operating system, which was able to run on
Nokia Internet Tablets such as the
N800 and
N810
The Nokia N810 Internet tablet is an Internet appliance from Nokia, announced on 17 October 2007 at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Despite Nokia's strong association with cellular products, the N810, like preceding tablets produced by Nok ...
(collectively known as the N8x0 devices).
It was based on
Ubuntu
Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...
9.04, and with the release of Maemo 5/Fremantle, a new goal emerged: "
o bringas much of Fremantle as we can get on the N8x0."
Shift to MeeGo
Mer suspended development at release 0.17, since focus had switched to building MeeGo for the N800 and N810 devices. By then, MeeGo was available and supported by a much wider community.
Collapse of MeeGo
The development was silently resumed during the summer of 2011 by a handful of MeeGo developers (some of them previously active in the Mer project), after Nokia changed its strategy in February 2011. These developers were not satisfied with the way MeeGo had been governed behind closed doors especially after Nokia departed, and they were also concerned that MeeGo heavily depended on big companies which could stop supporting it, as was the case when Nokia abandoned MeeGo as part of its new strategy.
This was again proven to be a problem after
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
,
Samsung
The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...
and the
Linux Foundation announced they were going to create a new operating system called
Tizen. This new OS began focusing on HTML5 and using the
Enlightenment Foundation Libraries
The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) are a set of graphics libraries that grew out of the development of Enlightenment, a window manager and Wayland compositor. The project's focus is to make the EFL a flexible yet powerful and easy to ...
(EFL) instead of
Qt for native applications. However, on May 14, 2014 it was announced that Tizen:Common would be bringing
Qt back by starting to ship with it integrated.
Revival with "MeeGo Reconstructed"
After the Tizen project was announced, the revival of the Mer project was announced on the MeeGo mailing list,
with the promise that it would be developed and governed completely in the open as a
meritocracy, unlike MeeGo and Tizen. It would also be based on the MeeGo code base and tools, aiming to provide just the equivalent of the MeeGo core with no default UI. The APIs for third party application development are included, meaning that Qt, EFL, and
HTML5
HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...
would be supported on the platform, and maybe even others if widely requested.
The project quickly started to gain traction among many open source developers who had been involved in MeeGo, and it started being used by former MeeGo projects, such as the reference handset UX, now rebased on top of Mer and called Nemo Mobile, and a couple of projects targeting tablet UXes such as Cordia (a reimplementation of the Maemo 5 Hildon UX) and
Plasma Active emerged on top of Mer. Equivalent Mer-based project of the former MeeGo IVI and
Smart TV
A smart TV, also known as a connected TV (CTV), is a traditional television set with integrated Internet and interactive Web 2.0 features, which allows users to stream music and videos, browse the internet, and view photos. Smart TVs are a techn ...
UXes are not yet known to exist.
The aim of the Mer community is to create, in a solid way, what had been unable to be done with MeeGo; Mer is to become what MeeGo was expected to be but has not become. Mer aims to become the MeeGo 2.0 when the Linux Foundation finds that it complies with all of the MeeGo
requirements.
Merger with Sailfish
In early 2019 it was announced that they would unify Mer and Sailfish operations under one brand, called
Sailfish OS
Sailfish OS is a Linux-based operating system based on free software, and open source projects such as Mer as well as including a closed source UI. The project is being developed by the Finnish company Jolla.
The OS first shipped with the ...
, discontinuing use of the name Mer.
See also
*
Comparison of mobile operating systems
References
{{Qt
ARM operating systems
Embedded Linux distributions
Linux distributions
Linux distributions used in appliances
Mobile operating systems
RPM-based Linux distributions