Getting Started with Maemo 5 - Frustration

So now that I have my shiny new Ubuntu installation customised like I want it with various apps, the most important being Aptana for its robust support of FTP in PHP development, I wanted to have a look at Maemo development and make some simple widgets for my Nokia N900.

I knew the Nokia SDK only runs natively on Debian based systems like Ubuntu. Sadly, what I didn't know is while Scratchbox Xypher and the SDK installed and functioned without issue on Lucid, when it came to the IDE setup, things didn't go quite so smoothly - in fact, they didn't go at all.

The recommended IDE is Esbox which is basically a plugin for Eclipse which can handle development in Scratchbox. However, Esbox in both its full Eclipse install form and the plugin form only works with much older versions of Eclipse and their Eclipse version didn't like my version of GTK. Despite the versioning info on the Esbox site, I figured maybe with Lucid I might get away with it but all I got was a splash screen and a contentless dialogue box that refused to die.

So it seems that even though I'm on Ubuntu I will have to use the virtual image of the Maemo SDK environment to get anything serious done on Maemo.

I intend to have a poke around this option over the next few days and will post if I meet any significant hurdles.