Eventually I gave up at this point - and decided to cheat. tl;dr: Copied the telepathy-qt4 headers and libraries from scratchbox into the Nokia SDK fremantle directories. Now my code that uses telepathy-qt4 compiles for maemo5 and the binary runs flawlessly on the n900. PS: In my pro file I had to add unix { INCLUDEPATH += /usr/include/telepathy-1.0 LIBS += -ltelepathy-qt4 } to get it to compile for Linux and for Maemo. **** Edit: These are the steps I took for my Win7 dev vm. 1. Copy Source: /scratchbox/users/$USERNAME/targets/FREMANTLE_ARMEL/usr/lib Destination: C:\NokiaQtSDK\Maemo\4.6.2\sysroots\fremantle-arm-sysroot-10.2010.19-1-slim\usr\lib\ File: libtelepathy-qt4.a 2. Copy Within directory: C:\NokiaQtSDK\Maemo\4.6.2\sysroots\fremantle-arm-sysroot-10.2010.19-1-slim\usr\lib\ libtelepathy-qt4.so.0 to libtelepathy-qt4.so 3. Copy Source: /scratchbox/users/$USERNAME/targets/FREMANTLE_ARMEL/usr/include Destination: C:\NokiaQtSDK\Maemo\4.6.2\sysroots\fremantle-arm-sysroot-10.2010.19-1-slim\usr\include Directory: TelepathyQt4