MeeGo is a light weight Linux environment designed to run on netbooks, smartphones, in-car computers, and other devices. The source code for the smartphone version of the OS was released a few months ago, but you still can’t actually walk into a store and buy a phone running MeeGo yet. A small group of hackers, on the other hand, are working on getting the OS to run on existing handsets including the Google Nexus One.
Android Police reports that a number of hackers have managed to get the OS to boot on the Nexus One, HTC Desire, and Dell Streak. The thing all of these systems have in common is the Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 chipset. Unfortunately while that chip features 3D graphics acceleration capabilities, the drivers are closed-source, which has prevented third party hackers from figuring out how to add 3D graphics support. That means that while you can boot MeeGo on these phones, the OS is excruciatingly slow to actually use.
Eventually we may see handsets ship with MeeGo, and odds are they’ll run much more smoothly. But if the driver issues can get worked out, it’d be awfully cool to be able to dual boot MeeGo and Android on existing phones.
wow, looks like a great way to give a perfectly good phone a lobotomy.