[maemo-developers] Android Vs. Maemo

[From: Joni Valtanen]

One of the finest thing in Maemo is SDK. It's quite easy to install and 
allmost ready to use after installation. With scratchbox developing is 
quite same than desktop. All these are good features.

Question is how Android handle sdk situation? I do not have any 
intrests to build product from scratch. I can do it without product if I 
want. So there should be "easy to install sdk", before it would make me 
any action.

Another problem is packaging. How to install additional software. In maemo 
it is deb-packages. OpenEmbedded these are ipkg:s = light weight deb like 
packages.

But I prefer OpenMoko in phones, because it is really open and ui 
is designed to the phones. At least some phones. Bitbake is used to 
building OpenMoko and OpenEmbedded stuff. I do not really know much about 
OE.

Other hand building bunch of debian packages from scratch to arm in 
scracthbox is pain. It is a lot easier to compile everything from plain 
sources and forget packaging.

For example gp2x has no sdk and people is compiling stuff statically. That 
is not what I like to see in "embedded" linuxsystems. open2x project has 
make some good things to gp2x. But I think there is no package management.

Yesterday I tested prebuild Angstrom arm-distribution build with 
OpenEmbedded. I got it working fine with device (not Nokia but it 
should work with it too). But did I miss something or where was developer 
packages? Again should I take whole OpenEmbedded and build it? Then I am 
able to create or test some own software? Am I wrong? If I am fixme.

Whole point is SDK/how to build whole system and package management. If 
these things are good in Android, it can be good option to phones. Android 
sounds like product and product things should do this or it is in same 
situation as gp2x. If linux arm porting is hobby and think no one else 
is using your compilations it is not matter if you build your system from 
scracth.

There is a lot of things allready. ... and coming things like ARM Linux 
Mobile Platform and Android. It's intresting to see what are strengths of 
those platforms compared to another systems. How could those make things
easier (building, packaging etc.).

- Joni


On Fri, 9 Nov 2007, Klaus Rotter wrote:

> vicente garcia wrote:
>> Hi, how you think Android will affect Maemo?
>> I suposse that Maemo has a lot of posibilities of be installing on a phone,
>> then...
>
> Android is distributed under Apache License. This means (to me) it can't
> use GPL or LGPL code. But this could also mean that just all
> applications are distributed under Apache License and that the libs
> which are used are LGPLd. This would offer the possibility for gtk.
> So I wonder which toolkit is used. Linux itself is GPLd.
> The Android specs will be published on Nov 12.
>
> In my opinion it would be nice not to have a couple of Linux Phone
> architectures laying around, which are incompatible to each other. There
> are some: Maemo (ok, currently not used as a phone), Trolltechs Qtopia,
> OpenMokko and now Android. The problem was, that Trolltech and OpenMokko
> are too small, they need big partners in the Phone market. So Android
> may have success, if there comes hardware and if the partners give it
> time (some years).
>
> -- 
> Klaus Rotter * klaus <at> rotters <dot> de * www.rotters.de
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