Mobile development with the EEEPC: J2ME

If you wonder why I've been recently dusting off Netbeans on the EEEPC it's mainly because I decided to start experimenting a little with mobile programming on the Nokia 5800 XM. I've had experimented before with mobile programming but this is my first tentative with an “all Linux” solution.

Installation

To enable Netbeans to J2ME mobile development I had, at first, to download and install the mobility plug-in. From the plug-in management window …

Netbeans 6.8 on the EEEPC

I recently updated Netbeans, installed on the EEEPC 900, to the latest released version. I first downloaded it from Netbeans download page. I usually prefer to download the base version, since I don't know preventively what I'm going to experiment and which plug-ins I'm going to need.

Installing Netbeans has been so only matter of executing the downloaded file

chmod +x netbeans-6.8-ml-javase-linux.sh

sudo ./netbeans-6.8-ml-javase-linux.sh

the installation then started and, after agreeing with the usual license, I selected the installation path and the SDK to be used.

Remote controlling a Linux machine

One of best things in Linux is that it gives you for free features that, in other operating systems, are supposed to be limited to professional versions.

One of the first things I learnt about Linux has been how to remote control it. Not surprising if you think the first Linux machine I regularly started working with (PIII550) is a headless one.

Installing OpenSSH daemon

In order to remote access a Linux machine a SSH server daemon must be installed (OpenSSH in this case). In Ubuntu this is just matter of a single apt-get command

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

once install completed you can access the remote machine by typing

ssh remote-machine-ip-address

Tired of command line?

Remote control in Linux is not limited to command line. If you type from your client machine:

ssh -X remote-machine-ip-address

then, while in the remote machine, you might need to set the DISPLAY environment variable:

export DISPLAY=local-machine-ip-address:0

you can then run your X11 applications