Symbian/Series60 SDK on Linux Initiative

Hello forum,

I am an avid Linux user, and have been for a while now. It saddens me to see a lack of support accompanying SDKs like this, especially ones that take advantage of such portable and open technologies as gcc, perl, and Java as is this situation here.

At the moment, I have a development environment setup where I do my coding and project management in Linux, but must build the project in a Windows virtual machine. It seems a shame to install an entire operating system for the sole purpose of compiling a simple project. There are a couple of efforts by the users at large to make this SDK work in Linux, and for some users these efforts have been a great success! Most notable of these efforts are the GnuPoc project and a seemingly less formal one here. I believe the second is a howto provided by a user of this forum.

The problem with these efforts is that their methods are very fragile, and non-robust. The packages available by these efforts are dated, and for the most part no longer work. They do, however, offer hope

I am proposing that a group of us either begin a new, or maybe revive an old project whose aim is to make this task less harsh for users wishing to venture into the world of Symbian on Linux. I am relatively comfortable with the OS and I still cannot succeed in getting a successful build environment established on my machine. I have a strong feeling that I am not alone in my frustration. I am calling for both users that have a build environment working, and those that wish to have one to post here to show interest.

Using working environments (GnuPoc and the other one), I intend to create some robust scripts if need be so that new users can achieve the same state. Whether the system will use the nmake/wine combo ala GnuPoc or not can be decided along the way. It seems that Wine can extract the Series60 SDK now, so that may be of use as well although Wine may be a heavy dependancy. I also realize that there is some licensing issues and that this is why the efforts mentioned above are more complicated than one would hope.  This is something else that needs to be considered. There have been a few tools that Symbian has since released the code for as well. These may be of some use.

Anyways, post here if you are interested in such a project. If there is not enough interest, then I suppose it is an indication of why other efforts are not being maintained

Cheers,
~djc