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

Note: If you have problems installing hal then do this and try again

printf '#!/bin/sh\nexit 101' > /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d ; chmod 755 /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d

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.