[maemo-developers] New to N900 and Qt, what's the best place to start?

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Jan 23, 2010, at 14:54, Kees Jongenburger wrote:

> Hi Paul,
> 
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 8:53 PM, Paul Hartman
> <paul.hartman+maemo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What's the recommended dev environment to produce Qt-based software
>> for the N900/Maemo5? SDK Virtual Machine? MADDE? Is qt-creator going
>> to be able to cross-compile to maemo target in my native Linux PC
>> environment in the near future? Can I develop in qt-creator and then
>> compile in the other environment? Since I'm just starting from scratch
>> I'm open to any suggestions...  I realize from googling that debugging
>> in N900 might not be so easy right now and hopefully more IDE-based
>> support is coming.
> 
> Given your experience and focus you might want to have a go at MADDE
> as you suggested yourself and report success /failure here.
> 
> see the blog post here
> http://maemoteam.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/a-small-presentpreview-from-the-developer-platform-team/
> 
> general information about MADDE here
> http://wiki.maemo.org/MADDE
> 
> and the hello world qt tutorial here
> http://wiki.maemo.org/MADDE/Qt_Example

I strongly recommend MADDE. It has been designed with Qt apps in mind. It surely will be widely used since it is much easier to set up and also more stable than scratchbox at least in my experience. Please note that it is a fairly recent tool, so you may find breakage.

MADDE also offers a complete set of tools. It even helps to build packages which for many people is a hassle they'd rather not deal with. I am looking to incorporate maemian checks into MADDE since it has a lot of perl code and Lintian is written in perl so we can re-use a lot of debian perl code to check packages. 

MADDE seems to have some strong support from Nokia, so if it breaks we might get help from the boys and girls in Helsinki. :-) /me waves o/

Even though MADDE has recently come on the scene, there are some tested tools used in the background, so I expect MADDE to be fairly stable. But I am sure they will welcome bug reports. :)

Jeremiah