I tried building hildon-desktop (cordia) on my pc (x86) and it did build (after a lot of quirks though), I don't think things will be much different on the n900.

I pulled all sources under cordia, and built them.

all build dependencies are either already available in ubuntu repositories or are under cordia tree on launchpad.

problems were encountered mostly when building the modified gtk, and when building cordia itself during compilation and linking, other packages had problems with deprecated functions, and warnings being treated as errors.

all installations were done in a separate prefix /usr/local/ which is the default anyway, as replacing gtk or glib in ubuntu can damage the whole system.

I tried installing cordia only to the main system directory, and then logged out, logged in from tty1, stopped lightdm, and did startx hildon-desktop from tty1, the screen flashed for a second and xserver terminated by itself with no errors, I don't think this is the correct way to try starting it.

does anybody how to start it correctly ?

thanks !