I saw an ancient thread by smoku but that was for mer and there was not very much success anyway.

So the question is: can we run fremantle on x86? not in scratchbox of course, just install it. Or maybe add fremantle repos to debian and install all the apps including hildon-desktop? (don't hit me I know it sounds stupid)? Or make a debian installation and overwrite all the filesystem except boot with scratchbox root. Or as a final solution run fremantle in a chroot but on the main X server, not Xephyr.

search the wiki for instructions on installing the SDK, or search and find the virtual appliances which are ready built.

I have the sdk installed, I just don't want fremantle in a window.

Have you thought about installing a .deb based OS and then adding hildon desktop?

Of course many of you favorite n900 programs will need compiling, but then as so many of apps in HAM are already ports, you could always find the native x86 versions with Apt-get or package manager.

I will try this and report back.

Now I installed ubuntu 9.04 scratchbox and the maemo sdk. I stopped gdm and fell back to console. I started a simple x server and tried to launch gui in that (display=:0.0) but hildon desktop throws an error, could not open D-Bus session/system bus connection and then hildon-home segfaults

any ideas?

Scratch it, I did it. Now I need to get touchscreen support.

I managed to make hildon-desktop run through scratchbox on the main display but it was too slow and I had the resolution problem so that wasn't ok.
Then I tried to build ibinde-hildon-desktop on ubuntu maverick (a hildon-desktop mod with no resolution lock that has been shown on youtube to run on kubuntu) but after a day of dependency spaghetti solving I managed nothing, so I gave up. If anyone can give it a try it would be nice, as adding the maemo repositories over an ubuntu installation with hildon-desktop will probably work.

AFAIK there were a lot of hacks in Maemo to get it to run properly. One of these is an older version of Python (2.5 iirc) than most distros have. Most things depend on Python. I suggest finding which versions key packages like that are installed and installing those, maybe that will work.

Debian Squeeze already has a hildon-desktop package [1]. Afaik it's the version that was used in Maemo 4, it seems to be poorly preconfigured and it seems like it won't make it into the next Debian release.
If you're interested in hildon on x86 best would be to support and improve that package by becoming a maintainer at Debian [2]. If a package is based on solid ground in Debian it usually will be available automatically in Debian derivatives like Ubuntu.


[1] http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/hildon-desktop
[2] http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/