Jamie Bennett Speaks

So Diablo has been released. Wasting no time I set about installing the new SDK under my distribution of choice, Ubuntu Hardy. The process is pretty painless thanks to the installer scripts but there are a few little gotcha’s that you need to look out for.

The two extra steps that you will need to do if you are running Ubuntu Hardy are:

as root add

vm.vdso_enabled = 0


to /etc/sysctl.conf and while you are at it change the vm_mmap_min_addr to read

vm.mmap_min_addr = 4096


To make the changes active you have to run

$ sudo sysctl -p


To continue the install first run the scratchbox script which you can get from here by first changing the file permissions and then executing it like so

$ chmod a+x ./maemo-scratchbox-install_4.1.sh
$ ./maemo-scratchbox-install_4.1.sh


From there add a user to the scratchbox environment with

$ sudo /scratchbox/sbin/sbox_adduser USERNAME yes

(replace USERNAME with your username).

and run the SDK script downloaded from here.

$ sh ./maemo-sdk-install_4.1.sh


Answer a couple of questions and wait. You will be presented with a screen asking what environment you want to set up. If you will be developing, and I hope you will be, then choose either option 3 or 4.

At this point go grab yourself a coffee, it takes some time.

Install and run Xephr outside of the scratchbox environment with

$ sudo apt-get install xserver-xephyr
$ Xephyr :2 -host-cursor -screen 800x480x16 -dpi 96 -ac -extension Composite


Finally start Maemo from within the scratchbox environment with

$ scratchbox
$ export DISPLAY=:2
$ af-sb-init.sh start


If everything went as planned you should be confronted with this

<img src="http://www.linuxuk.org/images/maemo-sdk-small.png"

Don’t be dismayed that all that work only got you an pretty much empty window. Take heart that will a little reading and a bit of effort, you too can get cool and crazy apps compiled for the Internet Tablet platform.

Happy hacking!