Symbian development using Linux

Programming your application or library based on Qt has always had the promise that you can deploy your application on many different platforms. Development of those applications can, likewise, happen on many different platforms. QtCreator runs on Windows, Mac & Linux among others.

Since Qt4.6 Symbian is also one of those platforms to deploy on, your Qt apps can run on one of the many many Symbian based phones already out there.
For developers to be able to deploy to Symbian there was one problem, you’d have to use Windows as your development platform. Here in Qt Development Frameworks we recognize that a large amount of development is done on Linux. Especially open source developers have made the point that developing Symbian applications should work on Linux.

So, today, I’m happy to announce that developing Qt applications for the Symbian platform is possible on Linux with the upcoming Qt4.7. This will be experimental for now. Please give feedback on how well it works for you!

What this means is that developers using a Linux system can use a freely available cross-compiler and the also freely available Symbian tools to create applications for a Symbian based phone.
Developers that are working on Qt itself will now be able to do so on Linux too.

Preparing with a Qt compile
Symbian has a bad reputation of ease of development, you would be excused if you think ‘preparing’ means something along the lines of including some soul-searching and prayer. That’s all to change, I’m convinced, with Qt entering this arena.
The preparations here are essentially the download of the required tools.

First you need to compile Qt for Symbian. This is a step you would be able to avoid after the final 4.7 is out and you can just download a binary. You can either use the upcoming Qt47-beta or clone the git repository; http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt

Second we need a compiler that can cross compile to the arm instruction set which is what phones use; there are two compilers that are known to work, the rvct-2.2 compiler and gcce. As rvct is not freely available I’ll focus purely on gcce here. Gcce can be found at http://www.codesourcery.com the “Sourcery G++ Lite Edition” is what you are looking for. Continue reading.

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