by Andrew Flegg

The Maemo Community Council and Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh are pleased to announce the launch of the Maemo 5 Community SSU project. It is currently in a testing and elaboration phase, and your help is required.

What is it?

Seamless Software Update (SSU), is the term Nokia used to brand the over-the-air updates of Maemo.

Community Seamless Software Update (CSSU) is being developed by the Maemo community, for the Maemo community. It aims to deliver fixes which can't be delivered easily through Extras, such as core N900 packages. It won't, however, bundle software which can be installed through the Extras repositories.

It's got a presence in various Maemo forums:

Who is it for?

Long-term: all N900 users.

Now: power-users, developers, Nokia/Maemo/MeeGo engineers, testers, documentation writers and those willing to risk a re-flash in order to help.

How do I install it?

Make sure you're running PR1.3, Nokia's last official Maemo 5 update. To see if you have PR1.3, go into "Settings > About product", you should see under "Version" it has the numbers beginning with "20.2010.36". Go to wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU using your N900 browser. Click on the "Install" arrow next to "Testing". Hildon Application Manager (HAM) will launch and will prompt with you a series of messages and warnings. Click continue and let it install the community package. Once done, close HAM and go into the applications menu. Look for, and launch, for "Community SSU". This will then automatically run through a series of scripts to ensure HAM will now be using community repository for updates. HAM will re-open and present a system upgrade called "Maemo 5 Community SSU". Once installed, your device will reboot.

These instructions are also in the wiki.

How can I help?

Can you write documentation? If so, it'd be great to flesh out the wiki page with installation instructions (to make it easy for users to install without worrying about missing a step or getting it wrong); explain more about the SSU and generally spruce up the wiki page and maintain things like the changelogs etc.

Were you involved in developing Maemo? If so, with Nokia now looking to Harmattan and MeeGo, we'd love to see your itches addressed in the Community SSU (CSSU). Have you always wanted to implement something in hildon-desktop, but Management stood in your way? We'd love to have it!

Have you written a patch for Maemo? Raise a bug and let's get it in the CSSU.

Are you a developer? There are numerous patches floating around for hildon-desktop; but they can't be included in the CSSU until they are configurable (via gconf) and default to off.

Want to test? Not only testing this release, but writing test scripts so that each release of the CSSU can get sanity checked before unleashing it into a "stable" repo for end-users. How do we do it? What should be tested? How is it organised?

Want to organise? There's still lots of process left to organise; hopefully there'll be bugs and features to triage and manage in bugs.maemo.org as well as communication of the testing, releases and end-user readiness of the CSSU.