Tcl\Tk on Nokia n800

Ever since I have owned a n800 I was impatient to try some coding for it. I tried to setup Ubuntu on VM and install the Maemo SDK , but I was greeted with hundreds of errors.

Then I tried the VMWare images of Maemo SDK, but again faced problems. Had trouble changing targets and using ESBox. Also to add to the frustration the desktop manager (which I believe is Xfce) behaves weirdly, especially after restarts.

So, I was looking for some option that was easier to setup and fast. Then I came across Tcl/Tk for Maemo. Tcl is a fairly old scripting language and Tk is GUI toolkit that comes with Tcl. One can create nice GUIs with very few lines of code. Give below is a sample script and the output:

font create myfont -family Helvetica -size 20
image create photo myimg -file "img.gif" -format gif
label .i -image myimg -background white -borderwidth 3
label .l -text "Hello Maemo" -font myfont
pack .i .l -padx 10 -pady 10

Once can do some pretty serious scripting with Tcl too ! Here is another screen shot of widgets demo script that comes with standard Tcl\Tk distribution running on my n800:















But for some reasons when I click on any of the hyperlinks , I get error ! Also I was unable to install Gnocl package on my N800 (OS 2008) . Even then I think I have quite a bit to explore with this scripting language and this amazing gadget !