Eclipse plugins for Maemo Development

Maemo Team has just released a plugin for Maemo Eclipse integration. This tool allows developers to use Eclipse IDE to develop and test Maemo applications.

This release includes:

1. maemo PC Connectivity version 0.1 (Beta)
2. maemo ESBox plugin for Eclipse IDE version 1.3.6 (Beta)
3. maemo Pluthon plugin for Eclipse IDE version 0.1.7 (Beta)

Maemo PC connectivity packages are tools and other components developer needs to install into his Internet Tablet to enable connectivity between developer PC and Internet Tablet.

Maemo ESBox plugin for Eclipse IDE integrates maemo SDK Scratchbox based development environment to the Eclipse development environment. ESBox plugin supports application developers using C, C++ or Python programming language.
Developers are able to do all their development work inside Eclipse, from starting the project using template to packaging final application into maemo installation package.

Maemo Pluthon plugin for Eclipse IDE integrates Eclipse IDE development environment to the Internet Tablet so that maemo Python developers do not need to use maemo SDK and Scratchbox as development environment. Maemo Pluthon plugin fully supports application development process with Python where developer develops and tests his Python application directly with Internet Tablet.

You can find more informations on the official plugin websites:

ESbox: http://esbox.garage.maemo.org/
PluThon: http://pluthon.garage.maemo.org/

wxGTK working on Maemo

Reading the official WxWidget blog, I discovered that one of their developer was working to hildonize WxWidgets. I wanted to know if that was just a test or if this library could work in Maemo, so I followed his suggestion and I grabbed the latest SVN sources:

svn checkout http://svn.wxwidgets.org/svn/wx/wxWidgets/trunk wxWidgets

and I compiled it in this way:

cd wxWidgets
./configure --with-hildon
make
make install

then I grabbed a simple "HelloWorld" from the official documentation. You can find the complete source code here.

I compiled the source code in this way:

g++ hworld.cpp `wx-config --libs` `wx-config --cxxflags` -o hworld

then I ran it in the usual way:

run-standalone.sh ./hworld

The result? I think that a screenshoot is better than thousand words :)


N.b: I tested this inside Scratchbox, using CHINOOK_x86 target, so I think it will work fine on Os2008. This could be a good thing to help other developers porting some interesting applications (uhm... aMule for example ;) ) to Maemo.

Nokia N810 available in Italy!

For the joy of all italian people, the internet tablet Nokia N810 is available in the italian Nokia shop.

You can find it here. The price is 459 €.

N.b: the discount code doesn't work yet.

Lower price for N800 in Italy...maybe N810 coming closer?!

I was looking in the Italian Nokia official shop, and I noticed that the N800 price was decreased to 259 € instead of 289 € You can verify it on the official website.

Maybe the N810 is coming closer? Who knows ;)

Skype on N770 (using Os2007 HE)

Great news for all N770 users! Someone discovered that is possible to make Skype run on N770 with Os2007 HE.

All you have to do is follow these steps:

1. Install skype-ui through Application Manager

2. Download this package in your PC and extract the file named skyhost

3. Find a way to copy the file skyhost to your maemo device in /usr/bin

4. execute this from root on your device: chown user:users /usr/bin/skyhost

That's all! You can find more information on the original post.

Alternative way to generate .deb packages for Maemo

Thanks to Mohammed Hassan now I know an alternative (alternative to the official howto) way to generate a .deb package for Maemo.

If the package already exist in the Debian repositories, you can get the .dsc file (for example in an ftp like this: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/s/spim/ ) and execute the following commands:

dget -x DSC_FILE_URL

It will download the package and will unpack it in the current folder. You have to enter in the created folder and edit the debian/* files to personalize settings, mantainer data, add deps ecc...

When you're done, you can generate the package with the usual command:

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

Installing qemu-arm-eabi patch into Scratchbox

Using Scratchbox and in particular the Maemo SDK with ARMEL target, very often when we try to execute some application we can get into this kind of errors (for example):

sem_post: Function not implemented

This happens because not all the functions have been implemented in the emulated environment. Lauro Venâncio has created a patched version of qemu-arm called qemu-arm-eabi.

Thanks to Marcelo Lira, we have a simple howto to install the patch into the Scratchbox environment. Note: you have to execute these commands from outside the Scratchbox environment and you should not be logged into the environment at the same time.

1. You need gcc 3.4, SDL dev library and Zlib dev:

sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4 libsdl1.2-dev zlib1g-dev

2. Get the patched qemu-arm. Notice that the patches are already applied, everything is here, and you don't need to get the qemu sources.

svn co https://qemu-arm-eabi.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/qemu-arm-eabi qemu-arm-eabi

cd qemu-arm-eabi

./configure --target-list=arm-linux-user --static

make

3. Copy qemu to the cputransp dir on scratchbox

sudo cp arm-linux-user/qemu-arm /scratchbox/devkits/cputransp/bin/qemu-arm-eabi-sb2

4. Add it to the list of cputransp methods. Open the file

sudo vim /scratchbox/devkits/cputransp/etc/cputransp-methods

and add this line:

qemu-arm-eabi-sb2

5. Configure the target to use the patched qemu as transparency method. Edit the file:

vim /scratchbox/users/USERNAME/targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL.config

and change this line:

SBOX_CPUTRANSPARENCY_METHOD=/scratchbox/devkits/cputransp/bin/qemu-arm-eabi-sb2


That's all! You're now ready to log again into your Scratchbox environment