Installing Scratchbox and the Maemo SDK

Scratchbox is a cross compiling environment that currently supports the ARM and X86 architectures. Coincidentally, my machine is X86 and the Nokia N800 and N810 are ARM.

The structure to build systems is as follows:

• Build the application on scratchbox. Probably uses the Maemo SDK also installed, as that is the SDK the phone provides.
• Package using the Debian Packing system. Howto
• Transfer package to the phone
• Install package on the phone using debian package manager.
  • Some packages already available on my site

1. Make sure you have the Debian package manager (apt)
2. make sure the machine is relatively up to date
3. make sure you have root
4. If you want to develop GUI apps, X is probably nice to have as well.

Install scratchbox first. Walkthrough is here

Useful link if the above is confusing is here

We were able to install using the install script with few difficulties. I suggest you do the same, as the walkthrough suggests.

To grab the install scripts, run

wget http://repository.maemo.org/stable/chinook/maemo-scratchbox-install_4.0.sh

I had to clean up my apt-cache, as it did an update first. It may also assume you have apt, so you may need to install that with your own package manager.

Eric Suggests:

1. scratchbox is big, I did not have enough space on my root partition, so

           a) FIRST, make an installation directory (e.g. /home/scratchbox) and then a sym link from /scratchbox  (ln -s /home/scratchbox /scratchbox)
           b) THEN run the install script as normal

Go to usage to see how to test if the system is working correctly.

Then install the maemo sdk. Walkthrough is here

Try to install all binaries, even the closed ones.

The install script is available by running

wget http://repository.maemo.org/stable/chinook/maemo-sdk-install_4.0.sh

See usage for information on testing the compilation environment

I couldn't get scratchbox and maemo installed on my PowerBook G4. It may be possible to build from source, but the tools I found that help install Linux apps on OSX don't yet run on Leopard.

Don't.

We have created an image containing an Ubunutu system with scratchbox installed. You should be able to install VMWare player and use this system for everything you need.

Test the installation