Greetings - before I pre-order an N900, I wondered if anyone knows if Garnet VM runs on Maemo 5?

The Access site: http://www.access-company.com/produc...net/index.html
only mentions the old Nokia tablets and older Maemo versions.

If anyone could either give the thumbs up so I can go for it, or save me some time and money on an experiment destined to fail - I'd be grateful.

All the best...jw

Thought I'd try to answer my own question.

The answer isn't a surprise (now I've learned a bit more about Maemo 5).I had no real hope it'd work, but you learn trying, right?

Thanks to the wonderful Nathan, I setup the Maemo 5 SDK via his VPC image on an XP Notebook

See these threads
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=32537
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=31141

I downloaded the Garnet VM for OS2008 and an 810 device inside the Maemo 5 emulator in Zephyr. I installed it from the file having found this:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...cation_Manager

I got the following error: "Unable to install 'garnet-vm'.
Incompatible application package."

As I say, no suprise, but I had to give it a go just in case. Sometimes my bursts of wild/desperate optimism pay off. I'll now see if I can find someone at Access that's prepared to answer questions from a complete stranger!

I emailed them the over the weekend, and inquired about support for Maemo 5 and N900. No reply yet. This is something that would solve many problems for me and answer many questions.

Sigh. The SDK is NOT an emulator!. No wonder GVM doesn't work in there.

That said, I hope they will upgrade it for N810 but I don't know if it'll be upgraded for N900, seeing it's now a smartphone.

Thanks, sorodoros. I've tried emailing Access and Nokia (just their customer service). Nothing from Access and a "we haven't been given that info" from Nokia support. Not a surprise really, but I figure it's always worth trying. I hope you have more luck! I also hope more people will start pestering Access for a Maemo 5 GVM beta.

Hi javispedro - I know the SDK isn't an emulator, but Zephyr, which was installed as part of Nathan's scripts, has a Maemo 5 emulator which runs in it, (apologies if I'm missing your point). I have no idea how good an emulator it is, and even if it's stellar I don't seriously expect it to perfectly mimic what would happen on the real thing.

I hoped my attempt to install the GVM in Zephr that might give me a clue to how close it was. A long shot, sure, but in the absence of real info, I'm just trying to get answers for myself.

I fully expect that the GVM would need to be at least compiled for Maemo 5 vs. OS2008, but as I don't know all the differences between them, I really have no idea how much effort it would take to make GVM run on Maemo 5.

So not much progress yet, but I hoped my efforts might be of interest, or at least amusement to other members of this fine forum

I assume you're talking about Xephyr? It's not an emulator nor part of the SDK.

The SDK is just a collection of utilities and applications compiled for intel/amd processors. No emulation at all (well, there's the ARMEL target, but not designed for actually running things).

You're right - I had Zephyr in my mind, but it is, in fact, Xephyr. Sorry.

I did mention Xephyr was installed as part of Nathan's scripts. He says it is not part of the SDK in his doc.

I also said I used an emulator running inside Xephyr, before abbreviating what I was saying to "attempt to install the GVM in Zephyr". I now realize I could have been clearer, but at the time hoped people would know what I meant.

Actually using a vm and Xephyr won't answer this question. Scratchbox is running as x86 code. It is designed to allow a developer to run and test his code which is compiled as x86. Garnet VM would be ARM code which is why you got the unsupported package. ARM uses totally different instructions and does "really" run under the scratchbox.

Nathan
PS Xephyr is basically the "monitor" to the scratchbox emulator.

Thanks Nathan - this is very helpful and, again, I truly appreciate all the work you put into the scripts and instuctions to get up and running.

The latest version of garnet VM works on the n900
FYI I installed from the command line using "dpkg --install foo.deb"