For developers, the N900 is probably the greatest device, or at least so it is for me. I mean, what other device has a terminal window, Vim, a Python interpreter and the ability to chroot into Debian?

While learning a new programming language, I have often been very happy to be able to try things out directly on my phone; when I don't have another computer available. There are still a lack of ports of some compilers and/or interpreters. The ones I am myself interested in include:

• GCC (for C)
• (MIT/GNU) Scheme
• (GNU) Forth
• Scala

I would like to know what the interest for different compilers and interpreters are. Are anyone interested in porting some of these? I could probably try to port some myself as well.

My questions are:

• Are you interested in the ones listed above, and/or some others (which?)?
• Are you willing to port some of them?

You can install gcc, g++, make etc. with apt-get.
I sometimes code some c or c++ on the device so I install everything I need for that with "apt-get install minutils gcc g++ make build-essentials" aswell as sdl devel libs. Before compiling I just have to make sure I have enough space in temp "export TMPDIR=/home/user/MyDocs/tmp".

I think there is a way to chroot into a development image, but I'm not sure plus with this I can get to coding fast and simple.

I tried sudo apt-get install gcc, with updated repositories and extras-devel enabled, but it couldn't find the package. Which repository is it located in?

Maemo 5 does have a GCC package (and other related developpment packages like make), it's in the sdk repository

add this to sources.list or the Application Manager

There's also an SDK Tools repository,which you get to by replacing "sdk" in the above line with "tools", if I recall correctly.

You can easily just install this stuff with apt-get, the problem is none of it is optified so it eats a healthy chunk of rootfs space. When I installed gcc and the like (before my last reflash, haven't gotten around to it since), I manually optified all the libs/binaries, but yeah. That part's a PITA.