Vala on the DR1000

[ross]

I've been experimenting with Vala on the DR1000 and thought it might be of interest to other developers looking for a language other than C on the DR1000.

Vala is a C#-esque language designed around the GObject system which underlies GTK+ and many other gnome libraries, so is quite suitable for use on the DR1000. It also compiles down to C, so there's minimal performance impact and adding bindings to other C libraries is mostly trivial.

The stuff I've written is very bare-bones at the moment, but sufficient to write simple GTK apps and use the DR1000 popup menu. The little demo app I wrote displays a list of ipkgs installed on the device (the output of opkg list_installed). If there's enough interest I may add wrappers for the other iRex libraries (the scribble and metadata ones seem most interesting).

The process to get it up and running is still a little complicated mostly because vala is relatively new, but the steps are as follows:

Prereqs: Working iRex SDK, GTK dev libs (on the host) & Glade 3 (for UI)

• Download and extract the latest version of Vala (currently 0.5.6):
  http://live.gnome.org/Vala/Release
• Download and extract the dr1000-vala attached.
• In the vala source directory, apply small patch:
  ~/vala-0.5.6$ cat ../dr1000-vala/vala-vapi-posix.patch | patch -p 1
• Build vala:
  ./configure && make && make install
• Set up SDK environment:
  ~$ source /usr/local/poky/eabi-glibc/arm/environment-setup
• Build vala test app:
  ~/dr1000-vala$ make
• Copy to DR1000/QEMU and run (add a .desktop file if you want to launch from the content browser):
  ~/dr1000-vala$ scp test qemu:/media/mmcblk0p1

Cheers,
Ross

[Viacheslav]

It would be useful to extend this app to install ipks by clicking an ipk file. It would be a package manager for DR1000.

[Iñigo]

Recently I've been playing with and extending this idea. Look at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=128020