Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

LinuxDevices has a very nice article by John Lombaro about developing software for Trolltech's reference Linux phone, the Greenphone. It's a breezy blow-by-blow account that starts with "I shuddered with anticipation as I opened the Fedex package" containing the phone, and moves on to installing the development environment (which cleverly runs inside a VMWare player) to getting the BusyBox command prompt to the phone from the PC, to writing, building and deploying "Hello World" to the device.

The author likes that the SDK is delivered as a VMWare virtual machine, which "makes the development environment cross platform, easy to update, ensures all developers have the same toolset and eliminates a lot of frustration when installing the toolchain." And he likes that it includes an emulated environment that is hosted on your development PC. On the down-side, he can't recommend using the phone as your regular mobile (and neither does Trolltech) and he wonders if the $700 price tag will put off the kind of un-paid, scratch-your-own-itch-motivated developers that constitute much of the Linux developer community. Also the source code to the applications on the phone is not provided.

As someone who learned Palm OS development by poring over the source code to the built-in Palm OS apps, I can tell you that last point is a bummer. Apparently, there are licensing issues. It makes me wonder how much we'll get to see of what'll be in ROM in phones running the ACCESS Linux Platform when the SDK comes out next year. I hope they recognize (as PalmSource has in the past) the importance of having not just good documentation, but complete source code for several of the ROM applications that demonstrate best practices.

If like me you're interested in getting your feet wet with mobile Linux development, see also Flash Sheridan's intriguing piece on getting started with developing for ALP.