14 DAY TRIAL // If you have not heard yet about Maemo, it is an open source software that allows you to develop applications for the Nokia Internet Tablets and other Linux-based devices. Created from components used in mobile and desktop systems, the Maemo project tries to be accessible and useful to all developers that crave to create the most innovative applications for the mobile desktop.
Today I am going to introduce you to the Maemo LiveCD, a Knoppix/Kanotix-based live Linux distribution that contains a pre-build Maemo environment and Scratchbox for those developers that want to develop applications without the need to install Scratchbox. Scratchbox is a cross-compilation SDK that contains all the needed tools in order to configure and compile open source applications. With the help of chroot, the configuration, compilation and installation are done in a sandbox environment, exactly like in the target device.
How to use it
Download the ISO image from Softpedia's Maemo LiveCD project page, be aware that the image has around 660 MB, so if you have a slow bandwidth it will take a long time to finish the download. When the download is over, burn the ISO on a blank CD and reboot your computer in order to boot from the CD.
At GRUB prompt, the default option is "Maemo LIVE 0.5a (ACPI on - DMA on - English)", which will automatically boot in 30 seconds if you don't do anything, so if you are an English speaker, just press enter to start the LiveCD, if not, there is another option, for German speakers. There's also an option that leads you to an advanced menu from which you can boot the CD with framebuffer mode at 1280x1024 or at 1024x768, boot from floppy, hard drive or test your computer's memory with Memtest+.
The CD starts very fast, therefore, in a few seconds you will enter the XFCE desktop, which is a lightweight desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems. The Scratchbox and Xnest applications will automatically start so you can immediately be able to develop or test your applications.
Installed applications:
On this LiveCD you will also find some useful applications for your daily tasks, such as:
? Mozilla Firefox ? XChat IRC client ? Anjuta IDE ? XMMS Audio Player ? Xine Video Player
Known issues:
At this moment the LiveCD is still in an alpha stage so there are bugs and problems. As stated on the home page of Maemo LiveCD the most common problems are:
? The kanotix-installer works only after stopping the scratchbox-core service; ? If you plan to install the LiveCD on a hard drive, name the first user "knoppix" otherwise you will have to fix the Scratchbox configuration; ? If the Maemo GUI does not come up properly, stop it and start it again; ? Neither Xnest nor Xvnc work perfectly. The development team says that they will include Xephyr in future releases; ? /scratchbox/packages/Maemo_Dev_Platform_RS_v1.0_arm.tgz is unavailable. Therefore, you can't build packages targeting the arm processor running Maemo on Nokia 770.
But check Softpedia's Maemo LiveCD project page or the official website for future releases, in order to see if the project state is more stable.
Please enjoy some screenshots of Maemo LiveCD in action:
