How do I install a development environment for N900?
 

Most of the utilities I use on N900 are old versions, and upstream development has fixed some bugs and added new features, so I would like those packages in Extras to be updated. Unfortunately, virtually every package maintainer I e-mailed answered that he stopped developing for Maemo years ago.

So, I will have to do the packaging myself. I want to install the N900 development environment on my desktop computer, but there seem to be two of them: Maemo SDK+ and Maemo 5 SDK Final. Which one is used nowadays? And are there any caveats about installing these ancient SDKs on contemporary Linuxes?

I hope I will get an answer someone with personal experience in setting up an N900 development environment recently. Please don’t just point me to the wiki or other general webpages, as that tends to be a maze of 404 errors.

Re: How do I install a development environment for N900?
 

The very first hint when I tried following your footsteps and creating a new thread with the same title was this:

Setup development Environment within N900 possible ??

There are posts on the first page of that thread linking to other threads discussing the topic in greater depth, including the SDK on the PC.

Re: How do I install a development environment for N900?
 

I’ve followed the links on the first page of the thread you linked to. One link is broken, and the others are from as far back as 2009, concern on-device development and not desktop development, and/or don't mention which SDK is preferred these days.

Again, instead of being pointed to a maze of old discussions (some of which are years old, and which often lead to 404s), I’m looking for guidance from someone who has done this recently, i.e. in the last six months or so.

Re: How do I install a development environment for N900?
 

NB While I don't have the time or kit to get into this myself, I am more than happy to update wiki with the current best practice, should that consensus be reached on this thread.

Re: How do I install a development environment for N900?
 

@CRCulver,

I currently have a more-or-less-messed-up-but-working-OK scratchbox environment on a debian jessie 32-bit virtual server (luckily in a separate (virtual) disk to it's easy to move, takes about 5GB). I remember also having a number of (clarity) issues with the installation, so my goal was at some point to make a docker container so that anyone could "install" it without any preparation.

Problem is the whole bind-mounting mess that scratchbox carries with it. Docker does not seem to like that and any operation, however trivial, resulted in a big delay (probably recursively calculating the image size).

My plan now is to use lxc directly. Problem is, like always, lack of time.

In any case, if you can get the "Maemo_Ubuntu_Lucid_Desktop_SDK_Virtual_Image_Fina l.7z" (1390MB) and start working with it (use qemu or virtualbox).

I do have also a maemo-sdk.qcow2 (qemu image), taking 7263MB, but I haven't done anything with it for a long time. Might check it some day and clean up a bit.

I think the best is really this one:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Building_a_Vir...mo_development

(might work directly with jessie or wheezy, but squeeze should be fine).

Re: How do I install a development environment for N900?
 

Ah, well, here is your first real check, then. There are no SDKs for Maemo that are still being maintained (so far as I know). It is even quite possible that _nobody_ has installed an SDK in the past six months. (In fact, I would say that the SDKs are in much greater need of maintenance than the various Maemo utilities are...)

In any case, the overall situation is this: in the beginning, Nokia was using a GTK UI for Maemo, and as such had built a Scratchbox-based SDK for development work. This is the SDK to which you were linking. (I think the Maemo SDK+ was just an attempt to add some extra features to the standard SDK.) And this is the SDK reinob was describing. It will only run on Linux environments, so if you don't have a Linux box, you'll probably need to set up a virtual machine for it.

A variant of this SDK was created to run on the N900 itself; this is what pichlo is describing. (At least, this is my understanding; I haven't tried on-device development myself. :) )

As time went on, Nokia decided to switch to the Qt environment for its GUI. As the Qt folks have an entire SDK of their own, Nokia stopped providing their own SDK and instead added Maemo support to the Qt one. This is the SDK I am using. (It runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux.)

Of course, Nokia basically imploded a few years ago, so they no longer provide support for anything that they've created. After the Qt project split off from Nokia, they had to drop all support for Nokia devices as well (as Nokia does still own all the copyrights, etc.). Long story short, if you want an SDK, you've gotta do some legwork to pull together all the various bits and pieces remaining in hidden areas of the internet.

And yes, this means you'll have to suffer with out-of-date wiki pages, broken links, and a wide variety of rather old discussions. There just aren't a lot of us around any more...

If you'd like to try out the Qt SDK for Maemo, you can still find it at this site:

ftp://ftp.informatik.hu-berlin.de/pu...l.no/QT/qtsdk/

You'll want to pick up version 1.1.2 (which was the last version that had support for Maemo). You'll also want to choose the "offline" installer; the online installer tries to connect to Nokia's servers, which no longer exist. After installation, you'll still need to download the Maemo toolchain (using the Qt package manager); I was still able to do that earlier this year, so I guess it is being pulled from somewhere else than Nokia. In any case, you can read more about various attempts to retrieve older Qt SDKs in this thread:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=92507

Re: How do I install a development environment for N900?
 

Thanks, Copernicus for your informative post. I have partially set up the Maemo 5 Final SDK, I'll try to finish it tomorrow. My interest at present is only packaging some updates for command-line tools, so I don't have to deal with the GTK+ versus QT split.

Re: How do I install a development environment for N900?
 

Just out of interest, what packages are you planning to drag, kicking and screaming, up-to-date?

Re: How do I install a development environment for N900?
 

Thanks Copernicus for the link. I've downloaded 1.1.2 (both 32-bit and 64-bit, for backup purposes), and then installed it (64-bit). I then used the package manager or whatever it's called to download the Maemo stuff. The download was from an IP belonging to akamai (CDN). I actually was careful enough to grab the temporary (7z-packed) file containing the Maemo toolchain (it's 379MB).

But this is the first time I've used, or rather, seen, QtCreator, so I have no idea how to work with it. Will have a look though, it does look quite nice.

Re: How do I install a development environment for N900?
 

I'd like to package upgrades for guile and gnupg. The bash4-opt maintainer told me that he still has an N900 dev environment, but has been unable to upload anything to extras, so I might just have to package my own bash upgrade.