What is the ballpark number in hours to port an existing Debian console or x-app to the N900 for an experienced developer? I am interested in getting into this porting business but my preliminary research discourages me as it seems that there are many-many-many steps before even the simplest of hello world app can be ported.

Anyone with real porting experience out there that could help/guide me into the right direction?

I would also like to know this. As far as i've read you have to change paths because you should put all files in /opt/. The wiki http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...rting_Software is also not very helpfull for this task.

Are there not new developer friendly screencasts for this? shame.

I ported proftpd to maemo5 - it took a few hours - more to get the packaging right than the actual porting. But then again thats an easy thing to port since its a daemon with no graphics etc to mess with.

There are some porting guides around - just google for them

Quick compiling guide for non gui apps:
1. install SDK
2. use debian source repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list
3. apt-get source package
4. cd package dir
5. dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

somewhere in between you have to install missing depencies and possibly build them too.

There are:

http://www.forum.nokia.com/Tools_Doc...on/Maemo.xhtml

Note that these cover C++ using either Hildon or Qt. Plain C is not covered, but all the API docs are here and of course all of the libraries are written in C:

http://maemo.org/development/sdks/ma...documentation/