Hi everybody! I'm new to mobile development, but I am an experienced Web developer (Python/PHP/Java). This is a hobby for me, so naturally I wanted to leverage my Python skills (and the language is just fun). I got the sample Python applications running, but since the future of Maemo seems to be Qt, I'd like to switch from Python/GTK to Python/Qt. Unfortunately, I could not find any cohesive docs for that. Could anybody give me a kind of quickstart guide on how to install / set up things?

Thanks,
Stephan

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Take a look at this presentation, it is supposed to be an overview of Python+Qt on Maemo with plenty of links to set you off experimenting.

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Hey attila, actually I already checked out your presentation. Unfortunately, the presentation skips the crucial step - how to set up the development environment. I know I have to install PySide. On the www.pyside.org there is a repsitory line for maemo (armel), but none for x86. Somewhere else I read I have to use extras-devel. Then, what packages do I install?

What I need is a step-by-step guide on how to setup my scratchbox environment so that your hello world example from slide 10 actually runs here. Obviously some kind of auto-completion or documentation browsing support in ESBox would be wonderful, but that comes later. First I need to be able to do hello world with Qt, not just with GTK.

Sorry, no X86 PySide yet in the SDK (or extras-devel), at the moment, I'd recommend going with PyQt (it will save you a lot of time for other reasons, too). It became available in Fremantle extras-devel a few days ago.

There is no step-by-step guide for scratchbox, as, well, in most scenarios you don't need (or want) scratchbox. Pluthon kind of expects you to have a device - it doesn't use scratchbox at all. Another thing is that scratchbox has various issues with python (versioning mess), not unsolvable, but something I'd rather not recommend to SDK newbies. If you don't need any maemo-specific API, you don't need any of this at all - you can develop with the desktop PyQt (or PySide if you're adventurous) and then just do some on-device optimizations with regard to the UI.

I already read about Pluthon, and it looks like exactly the right thing for me. Having to run ESBox in a VM is not the nicest of development environments. Unfortunately, I don't have a device (yet). I'll follow your tips to hopefully get started developing using scratchbox in the meantime. The python version mess is something i solved already.

Thanks for your help!

OK, in that case use X86 PyQt from extras-devel under ESBOX (just apt-get python2.5-qt4-gui and that's it, no special setup needed) until you get a device and can get rid of scratchbox altogether. It is a *LOT* easier/quicker to dev that way

I'm at home now and just like you said, works like a charm! I'll be off coding...