MeeGo, the mobile Linux operating system that came about when Intel and Nokia joined forces to marry Moblin and Maemo, will be using Btrfs as its default file-system.

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.

Despite the Btrfs file system still being highly experimental, the MeeGo developers have chosen to use it in their embedded Linux distribution

With MeeGo using Btrfs by default, Canonical making plans for Btrfs in as soon as Ubuntu 10.10, and Novell now pushing Btrfs in openSUSE, among other milestones for this advanced Linux file-system, we decided to see where the Btrfs performance is now at with the Linux 2.6.35 kernel that's currently in development.

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.

The MeeGo project was launched earlier this year when Intel and Nokia brought together their respective mobile Linux platforms in a combined effort to reduce fragmentation and offer device vendors a standardized platform. The MeeGo platform is endorsed by the Linux Foundation, which has taken on a stewardship role with the aim of facilitating collaboration around the software.

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.

Like many recent Linux releases, Mageia's installer supports btrfs, a copy-on-write file system with built-in support for subvolumes, filesystem-based RAID 0/1/10, online resizing, etc.

It is still under development, and not yet recommended for use in a production, but it is already the default file system on MeeGo, and is slated to be the default on Fedora 16.

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.