Other alternatives for application development

This is a great place for getting started with Moblin development. This page describes how to create a simple application and introduces a few useful tools to help quick start your development efforts.

Note: This is not a Linux software development tutorial. It is assumed that you already know how to develop software in Linux, including using <your favorite editor>, gcc and gdb, Makefiles, compiling, and debugging.

Moblin Compliance and Applications

Moblin Compliance is a program to improve application compatibility across distributions, by aligning the libraries and library versions that OSVs include in their distributions. When developing an application, you are encouraged to use the libraries and versions that are included in the pre-built development images. Doing so, will make sure that your application will run with minimal changes on all Moblin compliant distributions.

System Requirements

This tutorial assumes you have the following:

• Any recent, mainstream Linux distribution with standard development tools
• (optional) netbook or MID is recommended, but not required
• (optional) A PC with Intel graphics chipset is required to install the Moblin v2 ISO image (most Netbooks have this)

Sample Project Code

A simple Clutter application will be used for this tutorial. Code explained here.

Development Environments

There are a variety of ways to set up your development environment. We describe two.

• Develop on your Linux workstation with an occasional remote validation and debugging task on a target device.

or

• Develop within a Moblin v2 environment using a platform such as a netbook.

Eventually, you will likely do some development in both types of environments. Here is a short comparison:

Option 1: Developing on Linux Workstation

Most development can take place on a recent, mainstream distribution, such as Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 9, or newer that has standard development tools

Install or Update development packages

One of the biggest tasks is to align the version of the development libraries that your application needs to those found on Moblin v2 Library list. If you do not do this, then you risk incompatibilities when you try to run your application on a Moblin-compliant distribution. Given that today there are no Moblin-compliant distributions, in most cases you will need to get the new version from upstream, either as a package (if the upstream provides it) or as source that you download, build, and install.

In our tutorial, we depend on clutter v0.9. Eventually v1.0 will be released and part of standard distributions, but for now we have to download the bleeding edge upstream source and install it ourselves. Knowing how to do this in general will empower you to be able to get any version of library or app. Please follow the steps in Building and Installing Clutter from Source.

Running project in Moblin v2 environment

At this stage you can continue with most application development tasks, compiling, running, and debugging your application. Occasionally (early is recommended), you should run your application inside a Moblin v2 environment. Additionally, you will want to understand how to remotely debug your application running on a netbook or in a virtual environment from your workstation.

Option 2: Developing in Moblin v2 Environment

You can develop applications directly in the Moblin v2 environment.

• Download and start up a development image (running on a netbook).
• Inside the Moblin v2 environment, install the standard development tools.
• In a terminal on your Linux workstation, copy your project source to the Moblin v2 image.
  
  (in terminal outside the Moblin v2 environment)
$ scp -r ./clutter_hw  <ip addr of Moblin v2 system>:/<directory to place source in>
• Build, install, and run your project. See next section (this is the same as if you are developing on your workstation).

Download, Build, and Run Project

In our development environment (whether workstation or Moblin v2 environment), we can now build the sample project.

"make" above creates the binary and places it in the ./src directory. We can run it there without installing the application

"make install" (run as root) installs the binary into /usr/local/bin and registers the application to appear in the standard system menu, under "Other" category. The program is now in your path and can be run from any location

Project Features / Recommendations

The following aspects of the sample project should exist in all projects:

• Moblin v2 Libraries: Link with the libraries and versions found in the Moblin v2 Library list.
• autoconf: Use the autoconf system. Setting this up can be challenging. Full documentation is here.
• menu registration: Follow the freedesktop.org standard for application menu registration. Full documentation is here.
• Internationalization: Internationalize your application so that it can be localized in different languages. See the Internationalization getting started page. Full documentation is here.
• Docbook documentation: Use gtk-doc (or doxygen) style comments around your APIs for auto-html-format API generation. See API Doc Generation getting started page.
• Packaging: Package your application as RPM and DEB for easy installation on all Moblin compliant distributions.

Linux Project Generator

Often just getting an initial project started with all of the appropriate components is time consuming. To help quickstart this process, see Linux Project Generator.

Next Steps

Now that you have set up the basic development environment, the following links may be useful. Welcome to Moblin development!