Mono on Nokia 770/800

Last weekend finally I was finished the Mono packages for Nokia 770/800 devices, Wade helped me to get apt repository available. To make things more easy we made available an "Single Install Click" for Mono runtime and for Paco's PEditGtkSharp an small gtk-sharp text editior. Dependency check really make life easy, as example when you install PEditGtkSharp all need stuff (mono-runtime, gtk-sharp and maemo-sharp) is also installed.

For who wants install packages by hand, the N770 repository is:

  deb http://go-mono.com/maemo mistral user

and N800:

  deb http://go-mono.com/maemo bora user

Scratchbox developer kit is also available as binary. An wiki entry is also set up to give more information about Mono on Maemo.

The screenshot comes from Torello Querci. Unfortunately I cant buy Nokia N800 from Brazil, today I receive a mail from Nokia and they saw that to buy a device I must have a credit card emitted in USA. Maybe they can also restrict the Maemo download for non USA/Europe people ;-)

Mono devkit for Scratchbox

I worked last weekend on Mono devkit for Scratchbox, for who dont know what is scratchbox developer kits an small explanation from Scratchbox's documentation:

"Scratchbox devkits are used to build distribution specific packages inside Scratchbox. Devkits purpose is to provide a set of tools that can be executed on host instead of target device and thus it reduces time that is used to build packages. Usually devkit also provides a set of libraries that is compiled for target device so that configure scripts can find correct libraries and link programs correctly. This way package building is much more faster than doing building process on slow target device or emulated on emulator."

At moment mono devkit binaries is not available for download (let it be more mature) it means that you must download source and generate your own binaries, to do it please do this instructions:

1. Because users do not have permissions to write to /scracthbox/devkit directory by default you need to execute this command outside of scratchbox as root (username must be replace by your user name):

  # mkdir /scratchbox/devkits/mono
  # chown [username]:[username] /scratchbox/devkits/mono

2. Now you must login into Scratchbox and get the sources:

  # wget http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/viewcvs/trunk/release/sb-devkit-mono.tar.gz?view=tar

3. Unpack sources, enter directory:

  # tar -xzf sb-devkit-mono.tar.gz
  # cd sb-devkit-mono

4. Now you must get Mono and Glib packages to generate devkit, compile it and install in /scracthbox/devkit/mono, fortunately Make files provides a way to do everything you need in only one step:

  # make

Now you have your Mono Devkit installed and right to be used, if you want generate a binary deb/rpm/tarball to provide to another user or to use in another environments you can type this:

  # make tarball deb rpm

This is only first step to get a good Mono environment for Maemo development, and it makes more easy generation of Mono/Gtk-Sharp/Maemo-Sharp packages for device, I will try found some time to generate this packages on next weekend, maybe based on exiting Debian packages.

Comments are welcome!

Fun Mono Hacking

When I make presentation at forums every time ask me why Mono, my first answer is: "Because Mono is funny". Last Sunday (see picture) I was working on Menu bug (#80266). I wonder if other Mono hackers have as much fun as I do ;-)

Blog, finally!

I am not one of the enthusiasts of "Bloggers Wave" that comes some time ago, when I start Simios.org I write most of time things about Mono and application development, never personal things. Now I finally install Drupal and starts my "Blogger's life".