MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan Developer Documentation Develop for the Nokia N9

Installing Harmattan Platform SDK


MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan Platform SDK uses Scratchbox as the cross-compilation and development environment. Scratchbox is a configuration and chroot cross-compilation environment for building Linux software. The basic idea of Scratchbox is to offer developers an environment that works and looks like the target environment before the target environment is available. It also provides a large set of tools to integrate and cross-compile in the form of development kits (devkits). The easiest way to start using Scratchbox is to install it with a script.

The release has been tested on the following Linux distributions:

  • Debian Squeeze
  • Ubuntu Natty
  • Fedora 15

Before you begin, ensure that your host system complies with the minimum system requirements.

To start using Scratchbox:

  1. Install Scratchbox.
  2. Create and configure targets.
  3. Install target root file systems (TRFs).

It is recommended to install Scratchbox with the harmattan-sdk-setup.py script. This is explained in the section below. For a step-by-step guide, see the instructions on installing Harmattan Platform SDK manually.

For reference information on Scratchbox, see Scratchbox documentation.

Note: If you already have Scratchbox installed on your host system, the installer will try to upgrade the packages to the version required by the Harmattan release.

Downloading and installing Scratchbox

1. Download the Harmattan Platform SDK installer from MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan Platform SDK downloads.

2. To provide executable permission to the script, enter the following command:

 $ chmod +x harmattan-sdk-setup.py

3. To run the script with root permission, enter the following command:

$ sudo ./harmattan-sdk-setup.py admininstall

Note: If you are behind a proxy server, you must set the http_proxy environment variable on your development host before running the installer. In that case, enter the following command:

$ sudo env http_proxy=<your_proxy_setting> ./harmattan-sdk-setup.py admininstall

Harmattan Platform SDK is installed and ready to use.

Next, see how to use Harmattan Platform SDK.

Additional installer options

You can run the installer with the following options.

  • Run the installer with admininstall: installs Scratchbox and sets up the development targets inside Scratchbox.
  • Run the installer with userinstall: sets up the Scratchbox targets only. In this mode, you do not need root permission to run the installer.
  • Run the installer with ic: carries out both admin and user installation without the GUI (which requires you to install additional python Qt bindings on your host system).

Uninstalling Platform SDK

Uninstalling Platform SDK removes all the content from your Scratchbox home directory. If you have any projects or settings that you want to preserve, take a backup of your /scratchbox/users/<username>/home/<username> directory before proceeding with the uninstallation.

To uninstall the Platform SDK:

  1. To shut down all running processes, such as the UI framework, enter the following command in Scratchbox:
    meego-sb-session stop
  2. In the workstation terminal, navigate to the path where you downloaded the installation script, and enter the following command:
    $ sudo ./harmattan-sdk-setup.py ar
    This performs an admin-remove uninstall operation for the Platform SDK.

If you have trouble uninstalling the SDK with these instructions, you can try removing it manually.