I've read quite a few of the various Maemo development, SDK, Qt and other pages pertaining to developing for N900, but the information is scattered everywhere, and some of the docs are somewhat ambiguous - e.g. should I be installing e.g. QtCreator on my PC or inside my (Debian-based) Maemo development virtual machine? For a beginner, what will be least confusing?

Is there any advantage to opting for Qt5 over Qt4 for a new project?

What about SCM? While one can certainly develop without it, it's pretty crucial in my experience to be able to step back through changes sometimes. I've used Subversion in the past, now Git is popular - what's a good choice for noobs who have no experience or preference in this area?

Right now I'm at the point where I want to use QtCreator to develop a simple Maemo5 Qt app, but the most recent QtCreator version (3.x) doesn't seem to have a Maemo target. Is there another version that has that by default? Or do I need to install some additional module(s) for Maemo targets?

I've looked over the documentation and keep running into hurdles. Any brain dumps would be appreciated - maybe I can massage them into an up to date overview of preparing a virtual machine for Scratchbox and Qt development.

The number of articles in the Development category is rather staggering and some (a lot?) of the information is out of date with various websites being offline now.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Categoryevelopment

I've started a new page via which we can collectively put together and maintain an overview which lists the basic steps in setting up a virtual machine to use as a Maemo development workstation, and also some guidance on other preparations for coding:

Yes, it's largely cobbled together from other pages around the places and forum posts, but I still think it's useful to have this all in one place.

There's probably a lot more to cover before it's finished, but this takes the user as far as having a Scratchbox set up in a Debian Squeeze VM.

Anyway, here it is:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Building_a_Vir...mo_development

Contributions or suggestions for what should be included next are welcome!

remark concerning the sudo part:
The Debian installer (at least in expert mode, I haven't tried the "normal" mode for years) will ask you whether to allow root to log in or not. If you say "no" at this point Debian will be installed with sudo and the same sudo behavior you might know from Ubuntu.
This will spare you the sudo part of your instructions.
If the scratchbox packages aren't messed up it should also work without sudo at all, using the standard Debian way via su.

Can anybody inform me where is a version of QTCreator that has ARM/Maemo/N900 as a build target? I used to have that in a previous incarnation of my dev PC, but I've tried several versions now and none seem to have it.

Or is it something that must be added on to QTCreator after install?

I'm pretty sure that you'll need to add the Maemo Toolchain package after installing Qt. (Also, you'll probably need to use Qt 4.8 or earlier; I don't think there is currently any way to build for Maemo using the Qt 5 series.)

To get the toolchain, there's a program called SDKMaintenanceTool; you should be able to start it from within the SDK itself, or you can just run the program directly. On the first screen that comes up, select "Package Manager" and hit continue; on the next screen, you should be able to find the package listed under Qt SDK / Development Tools / Maemo Toolchain. Put a checkmark in the box next to that, and you should be able to download all the tools needed to build for Maemo on the N900.

In fact there is:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Qt5-Maemo5

...although, I agree that using 4.8 is still better idea, for now.

/Estel

// Edit

And much kudos for idea of such wiki page and this thread. Indeed, instructions on setting up developmnt env. are (were?) a total mess, and I had feeling, that thus, learning curve for writinf Maemo things was unnecessary step at the very beginning, while being much more comfortable later on. Which, still, resulted in most people bouncing off, after hitting the brick wall at the very start.

Thanks for all your help guys! At last I'm starting to be able to piece together an understanding of how all of these fragments fit together.

1. Is it even worthwhile to consider the choice of toolkit in this day and age? Hildon/GTK vs QT? Or should anybody starting a new project just launch into QT4.x?

2. Okay, let's assume we want to develop QT4.8 apps for now. Which version of QtCreator should I download? Does it make much difference whether I use the version in the Debian Squeeze repo as opposed to downloading one from Nokia's site (e.g. https://download.qt-project.org/offi....gz.mirrorlist) ?

edit: corrected old QT download link that is no longer functioning

If you have no interest in porting your app to other devices, and you're already comfortable with GTK, I don't see why you couldn't go ahead and code against it. That said, the N9 and the Jolla phone are totally Qt machines, and you can run Qt apps on Android now as well. (And most of Hildon is fairly well supported under Qt4 anyway, so you're not really missing much there.) For most purposes, Qt is probably the way to go.

While Qt in general does improve nicely from release to release, the Maemo toolchain has, sadly, remained basically stagnant for some time now. So, there is probably little difference in the exact version of Qt you are using, so long as it can manage to work with the toolchain...

Good luck with this project! I found conditions exactly as you describe, even long ago when the N900 was new! I never had success setting up a programming environment on any Ubuntu box, information was scattered everywhere, & I finally gave up on it. I'd been a long-time C programmer & having to admit defeat was difficult!

Yeah, I've gotta admit that I've never really managed to do the whole "scratchbox environment" thing myself. Instead, I just downloaded the Qt SDK (onto my Mac), and followed its instructions. Code compiles just fine, and I just load it onto my N900 (via MADDE) to do testing...