Thank you for the suggestions. I already have a good part of the UI done in C using hildon so switching to qt now just for the network access seems to much (i have no experience with qt either). I have managed to compile my app though by adding conic into configure.ac and makefile.am (mentioning pkg_config helped ). The main example code i am using is the one here.

So im requesting a connection and then catching the response using a callback function. The mentioned code seems to work but the response is the following:
helloworldinc[7618]: GLIB DEBUG default - And we are disconnected. Let's see what went wrong...
helloworldinc[7618]: GLIB DEBUG default - Libconic thinks there was nothing wrong.

So the connection cant be acquired eventhough i can acess the internet normally from the shell in the virtual machine. I have also tried directly connecting from code (without checking if there is a connection available first) but the following call:
returns a Name or service unknown error code.

Also while trying to use the curl library the curl_easy_perform function returns a a CURLE_COULDNT_RESOLVE_HOST code.

It appears my app cant resolve host adresses even though the VM is connected (pinging things from the console works perfectly). Any input on what might fix the problem would be much apprecciated.