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's described below.

Preparing the base environment

• Prepare a gutsy chroot in ${DIR}:

$ sudo debootstrap --arch i386 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:

  deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted universe

• Update the repositories and install ubuntu-mobile:

$ 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

Running

• Enter the chroot

• start dbus

  /etc/init.d/dbus restart

• and su - to the user created above.
• Outside the chroot execute Xephyr like this:

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

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

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

exec /usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2 &

exec ${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 &

exec ${PREFIX}/lib/sapwood/sapwood-server &

exec ${PREFIX}/bin/hildon-desktop

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