Joorin,
i too enjoy peeling back the layers on the system.
i've spent some time recently deep in the hearts of the linux bootup and stuff and its a complex and yet intriguing place

the suggestion of python was more for ease of starting, scratchbox is considered somewhat a right of passage and you have to add all that knowledge ontop of linux stuff too.
i didn't mean to put you off just merely tried to pass on some of the easy start tips.

by the way, i spent almost a year on my 810 and n900 compiling my entire system (in C) on device.

adding the sdk and tools repositories for maemo allows you to install build-essential
whilst theres no autotools (for ./configure scripts) nor dpkg-buildpackage available easily, it is certainly feasible to get most required -dev libraries installed and can build makefile type apps with ease.

@lcuk
I'm guessing you're suggesting to compile on the device to get away from many of the problems with setting up a development environment on my Fedora box.

This is perhaps the best suggestion that solves the most problems. But it has some drawbacks (for me). My network "situation" is, at best, functioning letting me use the WIFI connection in the N900 as much as I want but I need to get new hardware to make the device show up to the rest of the network.

On top of that, a quick inspection of the file systems on the device suggests that I've only got something like 65MByte left on the root partition (and I got this device from the store three days ago, I've installed OpenSSH and htop, nothing more) making me feel a bit uncomfortable with installing all that is needed for local development. Unless it all behaves nicely and uses this opt-solution, which I don't know how to check with less than installing a package.

So, I feel a bit forced, still, to try to set something up outside of the device.

Thank you for the suggestion, though. If things turn into too much of a problem, I'll give that a go.

yeah space is a problem
we haven't really considering optifying the include folders (tho its something i had in early optify discussions)

pr1.2 should bring some more space hopefully