[maemo-developers] programming on the n800 itself

[From: gary liquid]

Hendrik,

I build my application exclusively on the device in c.
I have installed gcc and the primary development libraries required for my
application and find the compile times for individual source files very
acceptable.
Of course when I need to rebuild the entire project I know its time to have
a coffee, but thats not such a bad thing.

There are some things missing which prevent this approach from working in
the general case:
primarily there is no autotools, so you cannot run configure on downloaded
sources, and dpkg-* tools do not install without some major tweaking.

I have also installed and use c++ and vala on the device, however both of
these take the incremental compilation time just above my frustration
threshhold.

Also, if you go down this route, I suggest you use a removable memory card
as your build location - it tents to be a vigerous process with lots of file
writes along the way - you would not want to risk burning out your internal
MMC card.

hth

Gary (lcuk on #maemo)

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 4:48 PM, Eero Tamminen <eero.tamminen at nokia.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> ext Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > Are there any ports available for programming languages so that
> > development can be done on the n800 itself?  Programming in the wild, so
> > to speak, instead of cross-compiling at the desk?
>
> Well, there are some interpreted languages that are installed
> by default on the device:
> - Busybox:
>   - POSIX shell
>   - Awk
> - Browser:
>   - JavaScript
>   - Flash action script
>
> All of them offer control structures, variables etc.  For example shell:
>        x=1; for i in $(seq 20); do x=$(($x+$x)); echo $x; done
>
>
> > I have hopes for gcc, or lisp, or something that can handle data
> > structures and static typing.  I've noticed there are a bunch of guile
> > files as part of my n800 system.  Is there also a standalone guile
> > interpreter?
> >
> > I've seen a report that gcc runs out of memory rather quickly on an
> > n770.  Does the same apply to n800?  And which memory does it run out
> > of?  RAM?  swap?  disk?
>
> I would assume RAM.  When compiling C++ code, GCC can in some cases
> take even half a gig of RAM.  The development packages can take
> a bit of disk also.
>
>
> > It seems rather ridiculous that a machine with 258MB should have
> > insufficient storage for programming ... back in the 70's we could do
> > some pretty sophisticated stuff on Unix on a 64K PDP-11.  Times sure
> > change, don't they?
>
> Well, the GCC assembler doesn't require that much RAM, but its
> set of modern high level language abstractions is pretty spartan. ;-)
>
>
> For example Lua would be pretty small (also interpreted)
> and should be quite easy to build for the target device:
>        http://www.lua.org/
>
> Python can be found from the repositories and it has bindings
> for Gtk, SDL etc.
>
>
>        - Eero
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