Has anyone installed scratchbox on any intel mac? I want to start developing for the Maemo OS. It would be great if I could just install scratchbox in OSX and code from there. Dual booting or running virtual machines can be a hassle sometimes.

Scratchbox requires Linux as its host OS, so you'd need to install Linux on your Mac (I recommend http://refit.sf.net/ for dual booting). Alternatively, you can run Linux inside a VM. As far as I know, and from my understanding of how scratchbox works, it's not possible to run it on Mac OS X and won't be anytime soon.

I've installed scratchbox on my Linux machines and I can use it fine over remote X from my Mac. Maybe that's a possibility for you too.

Resticting Maemo development to a specific platform was, in my opinion, one of the blunders that Nokia made when they designed the 770. If they had used a more generic Unix base, development environment porting would have been much simpler and extensive. As such, they effectively locked out Mac users and to a large extent, Windoze users. There is no simple route. I loaded Debian (what a hassle) into VPC (which will no longer be supported on the Intel Macs) and it was a mess. You really need to be a developer with skill to do anythng with it and given the tiny user base, that greatly restricts the amount of software that will be developed.

We are now nearing the end of the 770 life cycle, either a new one will be coming out soon, with attendant differences in hardware, or the existing one will slowly fade.

Would there be any value in creating a standard Parallels disk image of a Debian install with scratchbox and all the Maemo development stuff pre-installed? Would it be legal to re-distribute something like this, or are parts of the Nokia stuff non-redistributable? Of course, Mac users would still have to buy Parallels, but at least it would lower the barrier to starting development somewhat.

It would be far more valuable to have both a VMware image and QEMU image.

There's a VMWare image here:-

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1008

Not sure about QEMU though - is there anything about the development environment that is i386 specific? Wouldn't it be better to install a native debian on whatever architecture you were working on?

Edit: There's both available here:-

http://maemovmware.garage.maemo.org/