Maui using Mer

Back in Sep 2012 I sent an email to the Qt Interest mailing list showing off Hawaii and what I was doing.

After that I've been contacted by a couple of people from the Mer Project that explained to me what Mer is and what advantages it offers.

After I recovered from the overwhelming quantity of information to process I found a very warm and enjouable community.

Mer didn't come at that time with x86_64 support which was and still is pretty important to me because the main focus is desktop and todays machines are likely to have 64-bit capable CPUs.

Another issue was packages that were not up to date. Hawaii requires the latest version of many packages (mainly systemd, wayland and Qt) and so I decided to keep using Yocto as a base system building components on top of it with mauibuild and postpone my decision.

Here we are now, I've been using and updating Mer for the past months, packaged a lot of stuff and worked on a few adaptations besides x86 and x86_64, mainly Raspberry Pi.

OBS is a very nice tool that does a lot for you like rebuilding dependencies when you update a package and with kickstart it's been quite easy to make images.

There's a new mauibuild work in progress version that builds images from kickstart files with mic.

mic, the image creator, has been extended with a few plugins for Maui that bring improved syslinux configuration, dracut support, plymouth and plymouth-lite detection, and UEFI support although this cannot be used until I packaged grub2 and all the signing stuff.

Now that OSTree is getting RPM support this migtht work out very well with my original idea of atomic upgrades.

Even if Mer now has x86_64 support there's a nasty bug preventing me from creating x86_64 images but I found a way to work around the issue, I will likely be able to build both 32-bit and 64-bit images soon.