Marble/MaemoEnvironment

Maemo SDK / Scratchbox Setup

Developing for Maemo based devices does not mean to write software and compile on the device itself. Most of the development happens on normal desktop systems. A device like a N900 is indeed not needed: The scratchbox environment emulates it for you. Please follow the Maemo SDK Guidelines in the Maemo Wiki to setup scratchbox on your system. After package installation, follow the guide to start the SDK UI. You should end up with a scratchbox shell using the FREMANTLE_X86 target. Additionally, start the Maemo UI in Xephyr as described.

Compiling Marble

To strip down the number of dependencies, we will use the Qt-based version of Marble. The compilation requires cmake as the build system and Qt development libraries. Make sure both are installed:

[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > apt-get install cmake libqt4-dev

With the necessary dependencies in place we proceed to the next step, checking out the Marble source code.

[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > mkdir -p ~/marble/{src,build}
[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > git clone git://anongit.kde.org/marble ~/marble/src

Once all files were downloaded, prepare the compilation step:

[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > cd ~/marble/build
[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > cmake -DQTONLY=ON ../src

If cmake finished successfully, compile and install Marble:

[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > make install

Running Marble

Some maps have to be created at the first start of Marble. Currently this is not supported for Maemo. You can copy the files from another system or start up with a map like OpenStreetMap which does not need data creation. The latter is accomplished as follows:

nano -w ~/.config/kde.org/"Marble Desktop Globe.conf"

Insert the following two lines (create the file and directory if they do not exist):

[MarbleWidget]
mapTheme=earth/openstreetmap/openstreetmap.dgml

Execute the marble binary with the help of run-standalone.sh, a script provided by the Maemo platform to setup a working environment.

[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > run-standalone.sh marble

Marble should start up and become visible in Xephyr now. It will look like this: