Setting up Palm WebOS SDK on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04

OK, Palm has posted the docs here. But Palm has missed some crucial steps which will become very clear below.

So, background preparation first.
0) If you have firefox installed, you will most likely have package(s) called xulrunner or xulrunner-1.9 or xulrunner-1.9.1 installed. Now, Holy Lord is my witness, the Eclipse treats these packages as absolute radioactive waste (well not really, but JVM(a necessary component of Eclipse) and xulrunner have compatibility issues)and you NEED eclipse for installing Palm SDK. Depending on whose face you saw in the morning, Eclipse will either choose to work OK or crash on its own free will, till you have any semblance of xulrunner in your computer (no matter how many MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME, JAVA_HOME etc paths you set... I learnt it the hard way, after a wasted night, trying to make Eclipse work without removing xulrunner). And if you remove xulrunner, you will have to kiss goodbye to Firefox. My take, kiss FF goodbye. Its not really worth it anyways as Chromium is way better though still unstable when it comes to flash apps. Not having xulrunner also means not being able to install some Aptana plug-ins into Eclipse. But, at least for me, I never like Aptana IDE anyways (Quanta+ is WAY better).

Hence you have been warned. If you want to take the easy way, get rid of xulrunner now by: sudo apt-get purge xulrunner xulrunner-1.9 xulrunner-1.9.1

1) Install java runtime.
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

2) Download virtualbox-3.0.x from here.
You can choose any 3.0.x. I chose virtualbox-3.0.12 for Jaunty.

3) Download Eclipse-Java-Ganymede from here.

Choose any mirror that suits you (its approx 85.1 MB file. Might take a while on slower connections).

4) Download Palm SDK and Palm novacom from here.
The download buttons are in section 5. On a side note, Palm expects you to create an account if you want to download Palm SDK. As part of account creation process, your residential(or business) address has to be USA based address and you also need tofill out some Tax related info. For those 6.6billion_minus_USA-population, tough luck if you cant forge a USA address and Tax info.

OK, so all downloading is done. Now its time for some housekeeping before we start installing.

5) create a folder for Palm apps named palm:
mkdir ~/palm

6)make a folder for virtualbox-3.0 and put the virtualbox deb package in it:
mkdir ~/palm/virtualbox

then

mv ~/Desktop/virtualbox-3.0_3.0.12-54655_Ubuntu_jaunty_i386.deb palm/virtualbox/.
Before installing virtualbox, install some of the pre-requisites. This step is VERY important as the downloaded_virtualbox or virtualbox_installed_from_synaptic lacks these and at the time of virtualbox configuration, you will not be able to recompile the kernel as these libraries are missing (you wil prompted to recompile the kernel):
sudo apt-get install bcc iasl xsltproc xalan libxalan110-dev uuid-dev zlib1g-dev libidl-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxcursor-dev libqt3-headers libqt3-mt-dev libasound2-dev libstdc++5 linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

after this, do cd ~/plam/virtualbox

then

dpkg -i virtualbox-3.0_3.0.12-54655_Ubuntu_jaunty_i386.deb

When you are prompted to recompile the kernel (as part of virtualbox installation process), say yes.

Rebooting the computer after Virtual box install is highly recommended.

7)Now we start to install eclipse.
make a folder for Eclipse and move the downloaded eclipse package into it and extract it:
mkdir ~/palm/eclipse

then

mv ~/Desktop/eclipse-java-ganymede-SR2-linux-gtk.tar.gz ~/palm/eclipse/.

then

cd ~/palm/eclipse; tar -xvzf eclipse-java-ganymede-SR2-linux-gtk.tar.gz

After this, follow the instructions as is here for finishing the remaining Eclipse and Palm-Mojo plugins.

8) Now install palm-novacom and plam-sdk
create a folder for palm-novacom and plam-sdk and move these files there II had downloaded these files to Desktop):

mkdir ~/palm/sdk

then

mv ~/Desktop/palm-novacom_1.0.46_i386.deb ~/palm/sdk/.

then

mv ~/Desktop/palm/sdk/palm-sdk_1.3.5-svn234138-sdk117-pho368_i386.deb ~/palm/sdk/.

then

cd ~/palm/sdk

then

dpkg -i palm-novacom_1.0.46_i386.deb

then

dpkg -i palm-sdk_1.3.5-svn234138-sdk117-pho368_i386.deb

Your palm-novacom and palm-sdk installation is finished. Rebooting the computer after palm-novacom and palm-sdk is highly recommended.

In jaunty, after installing palm-novacom and plam-sdk, you will face a problem when doing this command "sudo start palm-novacom" as the system will report that no such process is active. This problem will not be rectified even after you had rebooted. FYI, novacom daemon HAS to be running for the virtualbox to correctly run palm-emulator. A very good post here explains how to work around this. With this, you are pretty much done. You can then follow the steps here to build your first palm app.

Note: After all said and done, please beware that Palm webOS SDK + Eclipse IDE is really unstable on Ubuntu 9.04. A friend of mine, (who uses Mac for all his work, had similar issues with Eclipse on his Mac and said Eclipse works perfect only on Windows... I can't vouch for Windows and Mac claims as I don't use either but looking at instability of Eclipse on my Jaunty, I won't be surprised). In-spite of all this hassle, I still use Ubuntu because I get Eczema whenever I work on Windows and my Father In Law does not own an oilfield so that I can afford an expensive Mac.

In most cases, whenever Eclipse crashes, I have (so far) been able to get it working again by completely removing the workspace directory and then launching Eclipse again so that it creates a new workspace directory (you can always save your project files somewhere else before deleting the workspace directory).