Announcing Smeegol 1.0

The openSUSE Goblin Team are pleased to announce the first public release of Smeegol. Smeegol is based on the netbook user interface that came from the MeeGo(TM)* project. Smeegol offers the latest Banshee’s powerful music player, a newer Evolution Express as mail and agenda client and several additional social networks.

The MeeGo project, a collaborative effort by Nokia, Intel and a quickly growing community of volunteers under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, aims to create an operating system designed for small-formfactor devices with limited computing power and screen estate. Think about platforms such as netbooks/entry-level desktops, handheld computing and communications devices, in-vehicle infotainment devices, connected TVs, and media phones. Novell is a part of the MeeGo effort, working with the Linux Foundation on their build infrastructure and official MeeGo products. MeeGo is using increasingly more openSUSE technology, including zypper and other system management tools.

Smeegol is an openSUSE volunteer effort by the Goblin Team to create an openSUSE interpretation of the MeeGo(TM)* user experience, offering the compelling advantages of the openSUSE infrastructure. Users are able to pull from the full openSUSE ecosystem for applications, using repositories on the Build Service and other 3rd party repositories. Moreover, thanks to SUSE Studio anyone can now easily create a customized Smeegol based OS from a convenient webinterface! On SUSE Gallery you can find an appliance (Featured Appliance this week) ready to be cloned for customization. Finally, openSUSE users can easily install Smeegol using the openSUSE one click install technology.

Key features

Smeegol 1.0 has some unique features to both stock openSUSE & MeeGo(TM)*:

• Media playback is provided by the latest offering from the latest Banshee Project, version 1.8.0. This provides users with the ability to purchase music directly from within the application using Amazon’s MP3 store. The Miro Guide is also available out of the box so you can hunt for the perfect podcast.  Besides the latest version of Banshee, we also provide the Community Extensions. These add additional functionality should you desire, like sharing music with friends over IM using Telepathy, stream music from Magnatune, discover internet radio stations with LiveRadio and a nice shuffle-by-similar and fill-by-similar modes, based on your songs’ acoustic similarity using Mirage.

• A full range of social network support including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr and Digg.

• Network connectivity using NetworkManager.

• Choice of web browsers - both FireFox and Chromium are supplied (you can install others if you wish)

• Choice on how to handle your PIM data - using a single application (full Evolution) or compartmentalise it using Evolution Express

Getting It

You can get a live Smeegol system for 32 and 64 bit systems. Both images are hybrid iso, so you can burn it onto any removable media - disc or disk.

openSUSE users can install Smeegol by clicking this link:

Find a SUSE Studio image, ready to be cloned and customized, on SUSE Studio image on the SUSE Gallery here.

Joining In The Fun

The Goblin team comprises several openSUSE community members, and they’re a friendly bunch always on the look out for help.  So why not jump on board and join us on IRC - #opensuse-moblin on Freenode; or join on the mailing list - opensuse-goblin@opensuse.org (pretty low traffic). Currently Smeegol is not part of the upcoming openSUSE release (Factory) and we can certainly use a hand in getting it in there.

Bugs, Issues, Enhancements

As this is a first release there are potentially gremlins that try and ruin your fun.  Firstly sorry if you encounter any, but please file a bug.  If you have a feature you would like please file a request in openFate. Consider helping out with the solution, we’re very much open for help! For other issues, e-mail us and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Notice that unfortunately Smeegol does not play well in a virtualized environment (hence a broken SUSE Studio Testdrive).

Thanks

There are many people to thank for helping us realise this milestone.  This has been a true community effort, with help from upstream Banshee and MeeGo(TM)*, and also from the many teams within openSUSE including the GNOME, KDE and LXDE teams. A big thank you to all of you.

*MeeGo is a trademark of the Linux Foundation. Please note that the Smeegol effort is an independent community project and not part of the Novell and Linux Foundation efforts.