Tag: N9

Nokia N9 vs. Garmin Edge 800 GPS Test

My legs aren't exactly recovered from Saturday's marathon, but a slow 5k jog anyway today. Sports Tracker was released for the N9 last week (or was it earlier?), so I thought I'd do some GPS testing. Held Garmin Edge 800 in my right hand and the N9 in my left. The results aren't that great for the N9:

I should do a test on the bike later. Maybe include the Garmin 405cx and older C7 phone also?

The touch-screens on these devices are different: Edge 800 works fine with gloves, N9 doesn't work at all with gloves.

N9 Scratchbox/Harmattan SDK Install

I'm experimenting with compiling programs for the N9.
Go to http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com and get their python script harmattan-sdk-setup.py. Make it executable:
chmod a+x harmattan-sdk-setup.py
Run the script as root:
sudo ./harmattan-sdk-setup.py
Press "0" for admininstall. This will start a lengthy install. On my machine it started with installing python-qt4. Then scratchbox (89Mb download for X86 and another 89Mb download for ARM). Then comes the SDK itself, one 825 Mb download for the X86-SDK and another 806 Mb download for the ARMEL-SDK.

Now I get:

:~/Desktop$ scratchbox
bash: /usr/bin/scratchbox: Permission denied

That's because the scratchbox install creates a new user group sbox, and adds your username to this group. We now need to log out of the machine and log in again so that this group is created and your user is added to the group. Now we can run scratchbox. Now, from another terminal on the host-machine, start Xephyr with this:

Xephyr :2 -host-cursor -screen 854x480 -dpi 96 -ac +extension Composite &

From the scratchbox terminal we can now start meego:

meego-sb-session start

This gives a little bit of error-messages, but nothing major I guess. And we have a working "phone":

If we start Xephyr in portrait mode instead with 480x854x16 it looks a bit better: (should also work by passing '-landscape' flag to meego-sb-session)

The screen where all the open applications are shown looks a bit strange:

This environment should allow coding and compiling in the correct environment on X86, and then cross-compiling on the ARMEL-target and packaging into debs for sending to the device. But on IRC I am told there's an alternative QtSDK toolchain that does the same thing - maybe in a simpler way. To be continued...