Wow, something that usually takes a couple of days has been achieved on a single day with the n900. I brought up the Web stack on maemo5! I am so excited, I am going to share my notes with you in order to kill some time.

There is a proper libwebkit-1.0-2 maemo package by Christian Dywan, though I just do things manually myself to get to know maemo5 better.

32bit Debian squeeze i7 hetzner build machine made life a lot easier.

Installing the SDK was painless via a couple of shell scripts found: http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/Maemo5_Final_Installation#Installing_Maemo_5_SDK_on_x86-32_Debian_based_distribution

sb-conf select FREMANTLE_ARMEL

/scratchbox/login

[sbox-FREMANTLE_ARMEL: ~] > cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://repository.maemo.org/ fremantle/sdk free non-free
deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/ fremantle/sdk free
deb http://repository.maemo.org/ fremantle/tools free non-free
deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/ fremantle/tools free
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/ fremantle free non-free
deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/ fremantle free non-free

I had to add extras-devel for something. I don’t know why it isn’t on there by default.

On the host system, /scratchbox/users/hendry/home/user is the working directory.

I had to build:

• gail-1.22.0 (wtf is this crap)
• glib-2.22.4
• libsoup-2.28.1
• xmlsec1-1.2.12 (my stuff, not needed for Webkit per-se)
• And a fairly recent WebKit checkout from 12/2009 with a few patches

(Later found out Christian has patches to remove gail and enchant. Nice.)

Try build things into /usr/local in order not to screw up the rootstrap and to know what stuff to copy across.

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:/usr/lib

I hate configure. You GNU guys have brought me to the edge of insanity and back.

When building, make -j8 speed things up a bit on a i7 machine. :)

For some reason or another some arm generated Webkit stuff is b0rked. Fixed with commands like:

cp WebKit/gtk/webkit/webkitenumtypes.h /scratchbox/users/hendry/home/user/webkit/WebKit/gtk/webkit/webkitenumtypes.h
cp DerivedSources/CSS* /scratchbox/users/hendry/home/user/webkit/DerivedSources/

If you see:

undefined reference to hildon_g_scanner_cache_open

That means maemo5 is going nuts because it can’t find some brain dead hildon patches my own sane glib. Simply implement the function like so:

void hildon_g_scanner_cache_open() {}

And the nightmarish thoughts of rebuilding a new gtk with hildon go away. Btw I noticed that -lselinux somehow snuck in the build process. Had to remove it manually from the Makefile.

I would like to build some Debian packages, though I need debhelper7. I dislike the previous versions like 5 currently installed on Fremantle. Also dpkg-buildpackage does not seem to understand -j8. wtf!

Copying arm built stuff to the device

ssh -A forwarding does not seem to work. Rsync seems a little unreliable directly from the device. So I first rsync down from my remote build server like so rsync --progress -artv 88.198.64.227:/scratchbox/users/hendry/targets/FREMANTLE_ARMEL/usr/local/ . and then scp stuff to like this scp -r * root@n900:/home/opt/.

Turn off the n900’s wireless power saving to avoid transfers STALLing.

root fs does not have a lot of space! So use /home/opt

Nokia-N900-42-11:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs                  227.9M    195.6M     28.1M  87% /
ubi0:rootfs             227.9M    195.6M     28.1M  87% /
tmpfs                     1.0M     68.0k    956.0k   7% /tmp
tmpfs                   256.0k     84.0k    172.0k  33% /var/run
none                     10.0M     72.0k      9.9M   1% /dev
tmpfs                    64.0M      4.0k     64.0M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/mmcblk0p2            2.0G    316.0M      1.6G  17% /home
/opt/pymaemo/usr/lib/python2.5
						  2.0G    316.0M      1.6G  17% /usr/lib/python2.5
/opt/pymaemo/usr/share/pyshared
						  2.0G    316.0M      1.6G  17% /usr/share/pyshared
/opt/pymaemo/usr/lib/pyshared
						  2.0G    316.0M      1.6G  17% /usr/lib/pyshared
/opt/pymaemo/usr/share/python-support
						  2.0G    316.0M      1.6G  17% /usr/share/python-support
/opt/pymaemo/usr/lib/python-support
						  2.0G    316.0M      1.6G  17% /usr/lib/python-support
/dev/mmcblk0p1           27.0G    481.3M     26.5G   2% /home/user/MyDocs

Argh, I hate Python.

To get the stuff running, I source a script:

Nokia-N900-42-11:~# cat setup
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/lib:/usr/lib
export PATH=/opt/bin:$PATH
. ./setup

And run my freshly built arm binaries.

Summary: maemo5 is a mobile developer’s paradise.