Pretendulator

Revision 4 as of 2007-11-28 03:12:25

Clear message

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Summary

Document what steps are needed to get a development or test environment set up for Ubuntu Mobile, and cover what limitations there are.

Rationale

When working for another platform, a development and test environment are required. Ubuntu Mobile needs to provide this to make it easier for developers.

Use Cases

Fred is a developer who has just had his brother, George show him his new MID. Fred likes the look of the platform, and wants to port his FredsFunnyMail program to running on it.

Design

By far the simplest way to get a development environment is to set up a chroot for Ubuntu Mobile to live in -- this then doesn't impact on your live system, and if you break the development environment, it can be recreated easily.

Ubuntu Mobile is built for the "lpia" platform. 

$ sudo debootstrap --arch lpia gutsy ${DIR} http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports
$ sudo mount --bind /tmp ${DIR}/tmp
$ sudo mount -t proc none ${DIR}/proc
$ sudo mount --bind /sys ${DIR}/sys

After those commands run, you should have a base environment ready to use, so we chroot into it to complete the setup. 

$ sudo chroot ${DIR}

Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file and enable the restricted and universe components. 

# apt-get update
# apt-get install ubuntu-mobile ubuntu-mobile-dev

Implementation

Limitations

  • No touch screen while developing.
  • DPI problems:
    • High DPI gets the size right but destroys the look and feel
    • Low DPI the look and feel right but the size is huge.

CategorySpec