[maemo-developers] maemo 5 on OMAP3 dev board

[From: Carsten V. Munk]

Mike Turquette wrote:
> Thanks for the link to the beagle thread, I should have searched the
> list first.  I'm looking to do more than just get support for the
> beagle however.  I'm interested in being able to build all of the FOSS
> portions of Maemo 5 from upstream sources via OE.  Sure Scratchbox
> already exists, but it only supports Maemo.  To be able to move back
> and forth between Poky, Angstrom & Maemo within a single build system
> seems quite convenient to me.
>   
Scratchbox supports more than Maemo, though - if you beat a little at 
it. :) Mer's scratchbox SDK is actually scratchbox building for Ubuntu 
Jaunty-armel (& Mer through repository pinning),
and could easily be targetted to other compiler flags/platforms if need be.

Our approach (for armel) is to base on top of a minimal Ubuntu 
jaunty-armel (targets armv5el) , and with the libraries that has a 
benefit for it, use hwcap to optimize for certain processors and such 
when there's a benefit to it (same strategy as Ubuntu). We target 
multiple architectures (x86, armel, powerpc) and multiple platforms 
(770, n8x0, zaurus, Wii, etc) so we try to maintain the packages at a 
level where it's easy to adopt to new devices if need be. Our Maemo 
upstream is the Fremantle components when sufficient is available.

The idea of OE for compiling Maemo stuff is interesting, but heed this: 
you'll be spending a lot of time untangling Debian-isms, untangling how 
things are put together, having a lot of frustrations with the packaging 
and so on (we've been working on it since this summer in different 
projects, so we know the horror it can be at times :) ). We have the 
current typical Mer-armel system with full unix tools down in 158mb 
jffs2 currently (that is, Xorg omapfb, hildon, network manager, and all 
that jazz, without trying to strip it down besides docpurge) , and we've 
used a lot of time making the sources aligned with Ubuntu.

We have working x86 port as well 
(http://bsd.tspre.org/~stskeeps/mer-virtualbox2.png) and we're fully 
FOSS, and there's a good bunch of us active now :), and we are using an 
imager as to be able to control what goes into the final image. Today, 
we just released our 0.6 version 
(http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer_Blueprint#Mer_0.6) for people to try out.

> I've already started work on building some of the Diablo theme stuff
> out of SVN (hildon-theme-*), so if anyone is interested in joining
> this project then just shoot me an email and we can collaborate!
>   
You're also very welcome to come by #Maemo on irc.freenode.net, take a 
talk with us and hear what Mer can be used for in your scenario. :) - we 
welcome any contributors and we're always up for a good discussion.
> Regards,
> Mike
> _______________________________________________
>   
Regards,
Carsten Munk (nickname: Stskeeps)
(Mer Developer)