Install the Nokia N900 (Maemo 5) SDK on Fedora

Hey! I finally received my Nokia N900 phone/toy/thing last week after almost 3 months of waiting; of course it’s full of awesomeness like every device one buys. For those of you who still don’t know what I’m talking about, this phone runs Nokia’s Maemo 5 OS which is essentially a Debian-based Linux distro with an adapted GUI.

Currently, the applications are mainly written using the GTK+ toolkit but the phone also provides QT 4.5/4.6 support. As QT will be the default toolkit for Maemo 6 (and for a lot of other cool reasons), it makes sense to develop new applications directly in QT.

I had some C++ and QT courses at school some years ago, I thought that it would be fun to pick it up again and try to develop a little application for the N900. This is the first article of a series explaining how to set-up an entire QT development environment for the N900 on Fedora, program a little “Hello World” application in QT, generate packages for this application and finally run it on the real phone.

Installing the Nokia N900 SDK

Note: Some months ago, Gerard Braad already wrote an article about installing the beta SDK on Fedora, but things have changed since then and not everything explained on his page still works (Gerard, if you are reading this, the comments on your site are also broken), this is more or less an updated and extended version of his article with my own experiences.

For convenience, we assume that the SDK will be installed on a 32-Bit Fedora 12 system with SELinux disabled (it installs files all over the place). It is possible to run the SDK on 64-Bit systems with some tweaking but it’s absolutely unsupported.

So, let’s start by installing the N900 SDK provided by Nokia…It’s available directly from their website and corresponds to the current 1.1 firmware (version 2.2009.51-1). Nokia provides a nice GUI installer for the SDK in form of a Python script. Unfortunately it is targeted at Debian/Ubuntu systems and won’t directly install on Fedora.

We need to change 2 lines in the maemo-sdk-install-wizard_5.0.py script for it to install on Fedora:

Line 2449: cmd += sb_installer_fn + opt + “-s ” + SB_PATH
Line 2504: cmd += “%s -d -m %s -s %s” % (sdk_installer_fn, self.__sdk_inst_m_opt_arg, SB_PATH)

Alternatively, you can directly download a modified script from here if you trust me . We also need to install some packages with yum so satisfy dependences in the installer and later for development:

$ su -
# yum install kernel-(PAE if you have it)-devel gcc-c++ PyQt4 Xephyr
# chmod +x maemo-sdk-install-wizard_5.0.py
# ./maemo-sdk-install-wizard_5.0.py

The installer should start. Select a custom installation, then it’s a matter of clicking “next” a couple of times and wait for it to download and install all the required files…

When the installation ends, you will have a complete N900 emulator and compilation environment installed in /scratchbox and two icons on your desktop to launch the N900 emulator and access the online SDK documenttion. If you try to run the emulator now, it will fail…we have to do some further changes.

Edit /usr/local/bin/start_xephyr.sh and remove the “-kb” option from the Xephyr startup script, then run “/scratchbox/sbin/sbox_ctl start” as root or put this line in your /etc/rc.local file to have scratchbox startup automatically at boot time.

Now you should be able to run the N900 emulator by clicking the “Maemo 5 SDK” icon on your desktop…

At this point, you are pretty much up and running with a basic N900 emulator! In the next article, we are going to install QT 4.6 in the emulator, add some repositories and launch our first QT program!