Sweet.

A couple things;

1. Windows 7 has VPC built in. Why add another virtual machine program to the OS. In fact VPC built into 7 can do some nice things.
2. VPC for XP/Vista is free, again why go VMWare. To get advanced functionality over the player; you have to pay for it...

Now I don't really have anything against VMWare; I've used the VMPlayer (have it installed on my Linux box) -- but since I already have a ton of VM stuff in VPC for development; it makes more sense for me to continue to use VPC.

If the work I do for myself can be used by others and can be used by those using windows to get into Maemo development faster, I would say that is a good thing. ;-D

Nathan

I have an image done; with "Finish" installation scripts (basically you have to accept the EULA of nokia's to get the url to pull their binaries). Then you type it in, and the script will finish the installation. I didn't feel like I should "eliminate" this step -- if Nokia wants I can have ship it fully populated; but I "assume" that because they have the binaries behind a eula; they want the developer to accept it.

And it has on the gnome desktop the ability to start Xephyr (the display) and the ability to start the x86 scratchbox environment. I've tested compiling in it and running the hello world application using the development wiki instructions -- and everything seems to work fine. ;-)

This is a VirtualPC image; and I've requested a project VPC-SDK on the garage and am awaiting approval. I've spent some time stripping things out of the image to make it smaller (No help, removed all locale except englsh); now hopefully I can get it to a decent size... Scratchbox and Gnome are huge....

A couple things that I plan on doing with it;

1. Upgrading to the final Fremantle (which I assume will be out in a couple weeks) --- I Will also release a script to do it -- for those using the image)
2. Add QT to it. My development will be targeting QT.
3. Try and use some/make sort of easy to use integrated IDE (not Eclipse, I hate that monstrosity) -- Where I can do one button compile/run and hopefully have debugging.

Nathan.

Guys, you are on to something here. This is a critical step if you want to make maemo community to really grow. I was like Maverick - got interested in developing for maemo again because of N900. Not being a linux user it took me a while to get the development environment up and there are still some rough ground to cover. So making an easy image with integrated IDE (with qt support) will be a huge deal for the rest of the world.

For Maverick: I am using Win7 64bit and was able to get the diablo sdk image working (thanks for the image) and esbox seemed quite nice for C.

My problems started when I wanted to setup Fremantle SDK. I wasn't able to install it - I guess the problem was old Scratchbox version? Does someone know or can point to some help on how to have them both working side by side?

Then what I really wanted to try was Qt development for Maemo. I didn't find anything involving IDE's supporting this. Now I finally have some sort of solution: Qt creator and then scp the files to scratchbox in order to test and compile the app from the command line. Is there a better way or are the tools just not ready yet?

Having preordered N900 I am finally excited to join the maemo community and contribute wherever I can, I just have to figure out the tools and practices. And they are not simple for someone who haven't done linux development or open source for that matter.

So a big thank you to all that are trying to make things in this front easier and more accessible to us stuck in the Windows world!

Ok, the project has been approved. I want to re-build part of the VM again (but I have all the hard part including the scripts saved -- just need to re-install scratchbox on my fresh install image).

I tried to "compact" my first image since according to the Disk Usage it take 3.3 gigs, but instead of shrinking the 5 gig file down it turned it into a 7 gig file. Compressed this ends up being around 1.7 gigs, but still wastes 4 gigs of your disk space for no reason.

----

Now, what I am thinking I may do is provide two images:

1. Without the scratch box installed but with the scripts ready to run. Then you can just double click the script from the desktop and it can run and install everything it needs as long as you have a decent network connection.

2. With the scratchbox (& everything else) installed, with just the finishing (Nokia binaries) scripts.

I'm thinking the image w/o scratch box would be easily under 1 gig compressed. Since the scratchbox actually takes a 2 gig chunk of the 3.3 gigs of space currently used.

Thoughts?

Nathan

I'd say option 2. Can't wait Nathan, great work, and much respect.

Just trying to keep this alive, no rush, but what's the status Nathan?

Good timing -- I've been really torn..

Here is the problem I've seen my Debian (Lenny) vm lock up a several times now -- normally it happens when you just let it sit and come back a while later. I am seriously debating switching to Ubuntu as I haven't seen this issue in my Ubuntu install that I was playing with for the Diablo scratchbox I set up last year....

Do I release it now, knowing that odds are quite good it will continue to lock up randomly for you guys (this is a large download) -- but get it out so that you can play with it; since the lock up is pretty rare (about once-three a day with the vm running 24hrs)

Or do I switch to Ubuntu and hope that it is just some weird problem in the Lenny install I have. I'm leaning on attempting to move it to a Ubuntu install.

---

In the meantime I haven't been "sitting" around doing nothing. I've managed to fix several other oddities and get a script built to install all the QT stuff including the QT Designer (in host) and QT stuff in the scratchbox.

I've also added a script to install all the Python stuff in the scratchbox.

Both the Python and QT are optional scripts that you don't have to run!

I've also managed to figure out how to eliminate almost a gig of stuff out of the VM that comes pre-installed. And figured out a technique to eliminate the apt-cache from filling up space on the primary drive (so that we can keep the initial size down (since compacting the drive doesn't appear to work).

I'm in the process of downloading the Ubuntu cd right now -- I'm headed to the grocery store. I'm seriously leaning towards releasing something stable. But if you would rather have the debian image knowing it will occasionally lock up let me know and I'll try and get it posted.

Nathan

Thanks for the update Nathan!

My thoughts: release early and release often, even if the initial release might be buggy. As long as you include your recipe for how you built it, you or other people might be able to improve it.

Well I have rebuilt it in a ubuntu (jaunty) image. I've created a "build" script now that does 99% of the initial configuration, if people decide they want to create their own "image" from scratch for VPC they can create and image and then run the script it and it should setup and fix the majority of the issues with VPC and help set the image up for development.

The best news is so far I haven't see ANY lockups!!! It so far has been stable and I haven't had to work around the OS like I had to in a couple places in Debian.

Second I was able to get the screen resolution to be 1280x1024 which makes it a lot larger than the 800x600 it had wanted to use. If you have a smaller monitor; you can change the resolution down to 1024x800 or smaller in the gnome "display" control panel.

I'm pretty happy with this version. I have only a couple more tests and then I should be able to release it. (Hopefully in the next couple hours)

The first image I upload will probably be < 1 gig. It will be the full OS, and all the install scripts to install scratchbox, nokia's binaries, qt, python, etc... Once that is up; I will make a "second" image that will have scratchbox installed. That image probably will be around 2.5 gigs.

The only difference between them, will be that scratchbox & nokia sdk will be installed in one, and not the other. In the one that doesn't have Scratchbox/sdk it will have a script which will set it all up for you. You just need a decent internet connection so that it can download the stuff it needs.

In EITHER image; you will still need to run the script that will download and install the Nokia Binaries, and then optionally the scripts to install the Full QT (including creator) and Python if you want either of them.

For those who are interested I have been committing my entire scripts directory to the projects SVN, and the images have full svn support and several of the scripts have built in to them to do a svn update on the full "Maemo_Install" folder so that no matter "when" you download the image; it should be able "maintain" itself -- eliminating the need for me (or anyone else) to have to regenerate the full os images or manually update them.

I know on some of the scripts their is probably a better method to do it -- but I took the "simple" way. ;-)

Despite being a huge proponent of security -- since this image really is designed for one use (developing) I have also "enabled" the root account so "su -" will work. The root users password is "root" The normal user is "maemo" with the password "maemo". The image auto-logs you in. No reason to "get" in your way while developing.

Nathan.