I've just started playing around with maemo in scratchbox. So far I've managed to get the maemo environment running in a Xephyr window and have built and run the trivial Hello World app. Before I dig deeper into the development side I was wondering if it is possible to download some of the standard maemo apps into the scratchbox environment (I only have access to contacts and maemopad in the default scratchpad installation).
Do I need to grab sources, compile them and run them using the standard scripts, or can I simply apt-get install debs from maemo.org from within the ARMEL scratchbox session. Can anyone give me some pointers on this or link me to a tutorial or relevant docs? cheers

If you edit your sources.list you may simply be able to get them from the repositories, I've actually never thought about that, though...

Source code isn't available for most of the built in apps.

You can always try "apt-get source <package name>"

And "apt-cache search <name>" to see what things might be called.

The garage apps tend to have source though, so you can always grab tarballs from the garage pages to see how more complex apps work.

thanks for the pointers.

In scratchbox, I tried a dpkg -i on a fbreader deb (and it dependencies) that I downloaded from the web. I think I had a running ARMEL maemo instance when I did it and things got ugly fast (crash, ARMEL no longer works). I think I now need to reinstall the ARMEL configuration. Will probably just rerun the Maemo SDK install script and start over.

Has anyone managed to install the application manager into their ARMEL target? This would make installing other apps a snap...

dpkg -i usually works, certainly for packages I've just created in scratchbox and need to install to build something else

after reinstalling and doing some reading I've had more success.

looks like binaries and source for all of the extras packages are available from the maemo repositories in both armel and x86 flavours.

in scratchbox I added

deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ bora free
deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ bora free

to /etc/apt/sources.list

then to install something (e.g. aisleriot solitaire) I ran "fakeroot apt-get install aisleriot" in scratchbox and it installed and ran without a hitch.

list of ARMEL binary extras here (there's probably a friendlier list elsewhere):
http://repository.maemo.org/extras/d...armel/Packages

another question: how do I gracefully reset and/or shutdown the running maemo instance? thanks

Re: deb-src
To actually access the deb-src line you'll have to use
apt-get source package-name
The
fakeroot apt-get install package-name
will only download and install the binary from the deb line, deb-src isn't used for apt-get install.

So:
apt-get source package-name
cd package-name (well, package-name with some version no etc.)
fakeroot debian/rules binary
(there are other ways to build, this is one of them)
You'll end up with a .deb in the ../ directory
This one can be installed with dpkg -i package-name*.deb either in scratchbox (use fakeroot then) or on the tablet (as root)