Maemo (Nokia 770) Development
This page provides a few notes on development for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet a.k.a. Maemo. The Nokia 770 is known as maemo 2.2, whereas the Nokia 800 is known as maemo 3.0. OS 2006 for the 770 is known as "mistral". This page has information on the maemo 2.2 SDK and development.
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Development Environment
Nokia provides a full SDK for the Maemo 2.2 platform. Installation instructions are available here. The SDK requires Scratchbox 1.0.7 and cs2005q3.2-glibc which can be downloaded from Scratchbox.org. The instructions for scratchbox installation are available here.
Please note that scratchbox requires the binfmt_misc kernel module, 1 Gb of disk space, minimum 512 Mb memory, and an x86 platform. It must be run under a GNU/Linux host, preferably Debian.
My Experiences
The scratchbox requirements were, to put it flatly, murder on me. Firstly, all of my systems are running OpenSuSE. Secondly, and more importantly, my only systems which have 512 Mb RAM or more are in use as dedicated servers, and none of them have X running, so development on them would be impossible with the lack of a GUI. My laptop, which I normally use for processor- or RAM-intensive GUI development, is has an AMD64 processor.
Running under SuSE x86_64
I'm considering trying to run a development environment on my openSuSE 10.2 AMD64 laptop. Essentially, this involves setting up a virtualized environment running x86 Debian. The options for this seem to be VMware or Xen. Being that it's the open alternative, I'll hopefully be able to use Xen.
Some Links:
- Virtualization Resources for openSUSE
- Xen3 and a Virtual Network
- Xen Full Virtualization Example
- University of Cambridge Xen Homepage
From what I can tell, the latest Xen will allow 32-bit guest OS's to run on a 64-bit host.
My Planned Projects
- Synchronize internal RSS reader with Google Reader feeds list
- Develop a way to copy links to RSS feeds, etc. into an HTML page that can be emailed/uploaded to my desktop for further reading
- Develop a desktop program that maintains a list of web pages, titles, other info, then sends it to the 770 to be downloaded and cached for offline viewing, and flushes the desktop list when complete.
- Figure out how to create application menu shortcuts to terminal programs, using
xterm -e command. - It's a real pain to enter simple commands such as pipes into xterm using the on-screen keyboard. So, I thought, wouldn't it be nice to design a graphical utility to do this. The idea is something with a file--manager-style layout - two lists (left is categories, right is commands) and a text box at the bottom. Something like:
|-----------------------------------------------| |scrollable categories ^ scrollable commands ^| | list | list | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----------------------------------------------| | command window (text box) | |-----------------------------------------------| | EXECUTE BUTTON | | |-----------------------------------------------|
The idea is that you could setup (in a text-mode config file, probably XML, and in a Settings GUI) a list of categories, with commands in each one. A command would be a name and a string. Upon clicking on the command, it will be pasted into the command window, an editable text box. You can then edit it to your hearts' content, and then click "Execute", which would spawn a new xterm window running that command. The original idea of this was doing lots of piping into grep (like ps -a | grep ssh) and ending up doing lots of pasting into xterm of the string "ps -a | grep".
