Setting up the development environment for the Nokia 770
The development environment for the Nokia 770 linux-based device has to run on.. you guessed: Linux.
As a developer the best place to go to is http://maemo.org. From here you can get all the information to get you started.
Even if you don't have the device yet you can start developing for it. Setting up the development environment is NOT easy, it's not like on Windows for developing for Windows CE: starting an msi and done, you really need to dive into Linux, and I must say it became a lot better but also complexer since the last time I used it (quite some years ago!).
As stated in this tutorial, the Pre-requisites for developing applications for the Nokia 770 are:
- Intel compatible x86 processor at 500 MHz or faster
- 256 MB RAM or more
- 2 GB free hard disk space
- Linux OS (Debian or Ubuntu are recommended, but others fairly recent distributions should also work)
Because I don't have a space computer to get this started I decided to set up my Debian linux in a Virtual Server 2005 virtual machine.
I downloaded a net-install version of the 3.1 stable release at http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/. This is a 180mb ISO image that you can bind to your CD-Rom in Virtual Server 2005 virtual machine. After installing the core functionality, you can install the other needed parts from the internet.
Installation using Virtual Server 2005 ok, but I kept getting a kind of timer value exceeded error reported through all my screens. This was really irritating! The only solution I find to getting rid of this error was recompiling the kernel, not something I was really waiting for. Another problem is the video card emulated by Virtual Server 2005: an Ati Trio64, This card is not supported in the X-Windows installed with Debian. The card is too old. I configured X-Windows with vesa as a graphics board (a standard implementation), but I didn't get to a higher resolution than 800x600 and it was really slow.
I decided to move over to VmWare.. installation was completely painless, except that I couldn't create a harddisk with size larger than 8Gb. No problems with timer value exceeded errors, and VmWare has a graphics card vmware that installed without problems in X-Windows. I now have X-Windows running at 1600x1200x16 bits (16 bits is needed for correct emulation of the Nokia 770 I read somewhere).
I tried to follow this tutorial for installation, this costed me a lot of time, and is NOT the best way to go. There is an Eclipse plugin available for 770 development called Laika, and the description for this pluginand the tools to install works better. Go to the tools page, and read about the tools that you need and how to install them.
First thing I did was install the java sdk. The laika page mentions Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition 1.4.2_08 to be used, I decided to download the JDK 5.0 at page http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp, I downloaded the linux self-extracting file jdk-1_5_0_05-linux-i586.bin
I couldn't install this file directly on Debian, so I converted it to a Debian package using the information at http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/142. Now you can install the package using dpkg.
Now you can download Eclipse. I installed it in the /usr directory. Unpackage the downloaded file using tar xvfz filename while you are in the directory /usr. run /usr/eclipse/eclipse to run Eclipse.
If you want to see what you get for development tools have a look at these screenshots!
I didn't get the Xvnc working (In Eclipse see Windows -> Preferences -> Scratchbox Preferences X-Environment), so I'm using the Xephyr as described in this tutorial. Make sure that you use equal X-Windows screen numbers.
In Eclipse I configures the Xephyr tool as follows:
Syntax for starting X-server: /home/serge/start-xephyr.sh
The ".. IP and number" field in my configuration is set to: DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:2
The viewer is in my configuration not used I think.
I now have everything up and running I can run and debug my applications in the Scratchbox emulation environment!
Good luck with your installation, you will need it ;-)