• http://dabase.com/blog/Starting_n900_development
• http://dabase.com/blog/n900_mobile_developer_paradise
• http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba/Package_Building_HOWTO

A shell with less key strokes and human memory needed

The bash shell over busybox is much nicer since you get to use ctrl+r for bash history which I find very productive.

apt-get install bash

And change the root shell in /etc/passwd to /bin/bash.

debhelper seven works on maemo5

debhelper7 “maemo ported” packages are provided by http://www.maemory.com/N900/ are well worth installing. All my own Debian packages use Joey Hess’s debhelper7 because of its brilliant suckless properties. dh7 debian/rules are much smaller and much more manageable.

As mentioned before the N900’s root space is stupidly tiny. :( I’m disappointed maemo developers didn’t union/aufs mount this problem away. Have a look at http://wiki.maemo.org/Opt_Problem for the “/opt solution”.

TODO: Figure out wtf maemo keeps it’s kernel configuration and perhaps try build my own with aufs support.

strace embedded debugging

In my /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debug.list I have:

deb http://repository.maemo.org/ fremantle/sdk free non-free
deb http://repository.maemo.org/ fremantle/tools free non-free

apt-get install strace and bliss

Where to put maemo desktop shortcuts

/usr/share/applications/hildon

These maemo specific shortcuts have some interesting options.

The I use for starting Web commander looks like:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.1
Type=Application
Name=Web Commander
Exec=/home/user/w
Terminal=true
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true

What /home/user/w looks like:

#!/bin/sh
. /home/user/setup
ID=$(wrtc -i webc /home/user/WebCommander.wgt)
wrtc -r $ID

And /home/user/setup:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/lib:/usr/lib

Android debug bridge on maemo5

http://git.webvm.net/?p=adb has a maemo port (debhelper7 based) of adb.

There is an odd pty issue with maemo5 that limits the amount of open shells you can have. Unfortunately adb does not alleviate this problem. However if you are an Android developer like myself it does seem to unify development somewhat. It also seems a little more responsive than ssh. Try it out.