Procedure to have the Hildon Desktop running on Gutsy

This is the step-by-step procedure to have the Hildon Desktop that will be used in the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded project.

Warning: Albeit possible, having the mobile system running in a normal Gutsy installation is more probable to cause problems, specially in these early stages of development therefore, it's safer to have a chroot environment, which is what described below.

Preparing the base environment

• Prepare a gutsy chroot in ${DIR}:

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

• Everything should be ready, so:

   $ sudo chroot ${DIR}

Packages

The meta-package ubuntu-mobile provides all the necessary packages and it's dependencies so, inside the chroot:

• Add the universe repository to /etc/apt/sources.list

• Update the repositories and install ubuntu-mobile:

  sudo apt-get install ubuntu-mobile

Development packages

Those are packages that are likely to be used when developing applications using the environment above so you can have the hildon desktop shown in your normal desktop.

• xserver-xephyr

Preparation

• Create a normal user inside the chroot:

  sudo adduser ume

• Prepare the script that the user just created will use to start hildon desktop.

  PREFIX=/usr
  THEME=${PREFIX}/share/themes/plankton
  
  export DISPLAY=:1
  
  export GTK2_RC_FILES=${THEME}/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:${THEME}/gtk-2.0/gtkrc.maemo_af_desktop
  export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
  export LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8
  export LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8
  
  /usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2 &
  
  ${PREFIX}/bin/matchbox-window-manager -display ${DISPLAY} \
                                        -theme ${THEME}/matchbox/theme.xml \
                                        -use_titlebar yes \
                                        -use_desktop_mode plain \
                                        -use_lowlight no \
                                        -use_cursor yes \
                                        -use_super_modal yes &
  
  ${PREFIX}/lib/sapwood/sapwood-server &
  
  exec ${PREFIX}/bin/hildon-desktop

• Edit /etc/hildon-desktop/desktop.conf and remove or comment out the [Statusbar] session if necessary.

Running

• Enter the chroot and su - to the user created above. That will start the dbus session.
• Outside the chroot execute Xephyr like this:

   Xephyr :1 -host-cursor -screen 800x480x16 -dpi 96 -ac

• Execute the hildon-desktop script as the user you created above.

As result, you should see the hildon desktop inside the Xephyr window.