The Linux Foundation has announced MeeGo, a merger of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo projects as a single project under the leadership of the Foundation. The news came in a posting by Linux Foundation's CEO Jim Zemlin who called MeeGo "a next generation mobile operating system designed for the next generation of mobile devices".

It's may be a twee name but MeeGo could be the next big thing. It sounds like something a child would say, or the name of a baby's toy, but MeeGo has much bigger aspirations in mind.

MeeGo 1.1 will be available soon for the Nokia N900 smartphone, which will be able to boot into either the MeeGo or Maemo flavors of Linux. Meanwhile, Aava Mobile, which is porting MeeGo to its Intel Atom N6xx based Aava Mobile smartphone reference design, joined MeeGo's overseer, the Linux Foundation.

The MeeGo Project has had multiple releases and has progressed significantly since its announcement in February 2010. This article provides an overview of the MeeGo Project for newcomers, a review of the benefits MeeGo Linux provides to the players in the mobile ecosystem, and discusses the features in the latest MeeGo 1.1 release, announced October 28, 2010.

Intel has revealed that it is developing a variant of the Linux-based MeeGo operating system that will run on conventional desktop and laptop computers. This move could substantially broaden MeeGo's scope, transforming it from a mobile platform into a general purpose Linux distro.

The MeeGo Project released the baseline source code for the handset version of the Linux-based mobile OS to the development community. This code is being developed as MeeGo 1.1, which is slated for an October release. The MeeGo team also released the MeeGo UI design principles and interaction guidelines.

Linux-based mobile operating system is gaining momentum. It may be one of the least-cool names for an operating system but MeeGo is lining up to be the next-big-thing on mobile devices.

At the MeeGo Conference 2010, AMD today announced it has joined The Linux Foundation’s MeeGo open source Linux project, and will provide engineering expertise intended to help establish the technical foundations for next-generation mobile platforms and embedded devices.

The MeeGo Linux operating system for mobile devices gained software support at the Computex show this week in Taiwan. Novell and Linpus both announced MeeGo-based netbook distributions, Movial announced a "MeeGo Services" development suite, and Telefonica has weighed in with support for the open source platform.