Maemo DP team blog

Documentation for maemo beginners

I announced yesterday that new documentation for the upcoming maemo 4.0, codename Chinook, has been released. In addition to updating the how-tos that give useful bits of information of maemo platform here and there, we have been busy with another goal in documentation. A completely new guide written for developers completely unfamiliar with maemo is finally getting to a beta stage.

So far, at least I have not been satisfied with the level of documentation of our platform. There is no easy place to start learning. Vast amount of information is available from the how-tos, tutorials, wiki, mailing lists and IRC not to mention the upstream projects’ documentation. However, even the basic definitions of “maemo”, “maemo platform”, “Hildon” etc. are lacking.

The “maemo 4 Quick Start Guide” strives to give an overall picture of software development on an open platform for Nokia Internet Tablets called maemo. The prerequisites for the reader of this guide will be basic GNU/Linux C programming knowledge. GTK+ experience will not hurt but it is not necessary, neither is previous embedded or mobile programming experience. This all might still be asking a lot, but the guide would not be a “quick start” if for example GNU/Linux would have to be explained in the scope of 30 pages.

Instead of publishing the guide right now I challenge you to give feedback on the table of contents of the document. Just comment this blog or drop a line to documentation@maemo.org. This is your chance of affecting what you think is relevant for maemo beginners to know. Thank you in advance!

– jtukkine