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\secstar{Asus eeepc 1005HA and Meego 1.0.1}
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I bought my eeepc in last December and since then I have been using Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UMR) or Ubuntu Netbook Edition (UNE). 
It was working good and with some hacks, I was able to use it to its best.

I don't use my netbook for much multimedia purposes (still I need to listen to a set of songs once in a while). 
I have a desktop from my institute and another pc with a big screen TV connected to it for my multimedia choices. 
When I saw Meego coming out from maemo and moblin, I was actually excited. There were many reasons for my excitement, 
one of them being curious to see how they choose or combined the two legacies (maemo comes from so called debian side and moblin from fedora).
Other was of happiness, since an OS meant for mobile/smartphone computing will definitely be simple and faster.

Due to all the excitement and my interest in OSes for netbooks based on Linux, I tried it out yesterday (yeah, I know its one and half months after 1.0 came out). To say the least, it was a very good system. 
Yeah there are a lot of drawbacks. But for a 1.0 release, it appears pretty good.

The thing I hated most in these first 24 hrs is (whether you believe or not), it doesn’t have g++. 
It is quite essential to compile some things which doesn’t come with the default system or in repository. 
Frankly speaking, I didn’t care that I don’t have multimedia capability, but g++ is essential for me.

As most of the other reviews say, interface is very good and the best for a netbook. I will even go to the extent of saying that this is the best one that I have seen. Still there are issues with policy kit authetication (for my NTFS partition from windows 
installed by ASUS and ext4 of 10.04 UNE). Since the system or syslinux based bootloader doesn’t support ext4, 
I had to recover the grub for ubuntu (which took some of my time).

Lack of office programs won't bother me much, but I did not quite understand the part of gadget (which allows you to add numerous 
plugin scripts the system). Poorly designed and quite out of focus. I use \LaTeX and beamer for my document and presentation 
purposes, so I was ok when office was not there in Meego. But, when I get an ODF standard document, 
I don’t really know what to do.

I noted another interesting aspect, the whole Meego claims to have Malayalam support and can input and render 
Malayalam quite well (smc-fonts are missing, I am planning to put a repo in our savannah and later make sure 
meego uses smc-fonts and it comes by default). Chromium has some issue when it comes to rendering Unicode 
5.0 (pre unicode 5.1 chillus, it is not able to convert cons+virama+ zwj-> chillu). 
The interface renders it very well though. So, I think it has something to do with the chromium 
rendering modules (webkit I suppose, to be fair, chrome in windows doesn’t show such tendencies).

Anyway, for serious netbook users and for future smartphones, systems based on meego and android are the 
future. I am all out to make sure Malayalam is working perfect and out of the box for meego (its easier 
for me and since its built especially for atom, I am one of the few who can test it).

I will setup a repository for smc fonts for meego in savannah. Next step is to make meego developers add smc-fonts 
in the repo. Another task is about verifying the rendering issue with chromium (which might take time, since I need to 
find chromium users in GNU Linux).

For a first release, I should say, meego is very impressive. Yeah I know it doesn't have multimedia capabilities (can't even 
play my MP3 files), still it gets a lot of marks for the interface. If they succeed in making the interface flawless, 
with a good sync with policy-kit to authenticate, I think meego can make a big leap with its next release.

\begin{flushright}(July 16, 2010)\end{flushright}

\subsection*{Comments}
\begin{enumerate}
 \item{Ashik S}
 
I can help with testing things on Chromium – in fact Rajiv Nair (mandoos) and me are having it as our default browsers on 
our Ubuntu and Arch systems. Give us the test cases and we will run them and give you the results.

 \item{jinsbond007}
 
hi,

Thanks. So far I have only one problem with chromium. Reading Malayalam.
I installed smc-fonts, set the browser font to Meera and encoding to UTF8. But, it is having some issue with chillus 
formed by ZWJ.
I am going home tomorrow, so not sure when will I be able to give the details but I will try my best. 

The problem is only with the browser, all apps are gtk based (but, there is qt also under the hood though no apps 
are yet available). Since MeeGo is a combination of Moblin and maemo, I think it will have these kind of behaviour. 

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