S60 development on Windows 7

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:00:40 +0200

One of the first comments to my S60 SDK and tools on Windows Vista - a success story article was that we should hurry up with making the tools compatible with Vista because what do you know, Windows 7 is around the corner and we will be again trailing behind ... :)

Well, Windows 7 (beta, Ultimate edition) is now available for download and is surprisingly stable. On a modest IBM Thinkpad T41 the OS installs ok and although it has some bells and whistles disabled (or because of that, after all Aero is cute but resource hungry) I find it to be fast and fresh ...

So, how do Carbide (now version 2.0) and the S60 SDK (now the S60 5th Edition SDK v0.9) behave on this Windows release?

As with Vista, the key is to be careful and as much as possible in control of what you're doing. There seems to be only two rules to follow: install the tools with admin rights and verify the result after each step.

I've followed roughly the same steps and compared with the previous results the following are to be noted:

The only ActivePerl package I've found for download was in *.msi format. This is basically a document to be handled by the Windows Installer and does not have a "Run as Administrator" option.
Holding the Shift key down while accessing the context menu one can find a "Run as other user..." option but in an attempt to use that I found out that the Administrator account was by default disabled.
I ended up enabling this account, setting a password for it and then running the Windows Installer from the command line (just to be sure):

> runas /noprofile /user:administrator "msiexec /i c:\users\lucian\desktop\ActivePerl-5.6.1.635-MSWin32-x86.msi"
Aside from this small complication all went ok and at the end I could verify that Perl was correctly added to the path and can be invoked (tools verification as described in How do I start programming for Symbian OS?).
As in the previous post, I've chose to install the GCC compiler myself rather than let the SDK setup to start it. However, despite running it with administrator privileges the installer was not able to modify the %PATH% environment variable so I had to edit it manually and set it as %PATH%=c:\Program Files\CSL Arm Toolchain\bin;%PATH%
The emulator is running OK with no hacks applied (like DEP deactivation), just the usual firewall blockage removal

That's it. Unofficially and with a "only for hackers" recommendation I declare the S60 development tools Windows 7 ready. :)

Btw, as in the previous tests, I found that I don't need the official Vista patch provided with the SDK or any of the many hacks documented in the Migrating to Windows Vista wiki article. Or at least I did not need them ... yet.

Lucian Tomuta's Forum Nokia Blog

S60 development on Windows 7