S60 SDK and tools on Windows Vista - a success story

ltomuta — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:30:56 +0300

The following is a copy of a Discussion Board post from a thread discussing - again - the level of support of the S60 tools and SDK for the Windows Vista, or more likely the lack there of.

This thread finally made me curious enough to try installing the SDK on Windows Vista. Here are my results:

OS: Vista Home Premium + SP1
SDK: S60 3rd FP1
IDE: Carbide.C++ 1.3 Pro (eval)
Tools: Active Perl 5.6.1 build 635, GCCE 2005-q1c

1) Install Carbide
setup.exe -> next -> ... the usual ... -> finish.

To be noted that the installation is done in C:\Apps rather than the protect c:\Program Files\...

2) From the html page displayed by Carbide at the end of the install download Active Perl

Since Perl was already reported to be tricky (and since it will try to touch at least the %PATH% env. variable) I've made sure to run the setup.exe in Administrator mode. All went just fine.

3) SDK download

Again, the SDK installs files under c:\Program Files\... so Admin mode is preferable. All went swell until I was prompted to ...

4) Install GCCE

Since I was not sure if the installation is to be run in Admin mode I've decided not to perform the install at that time. Once I've answered NO to the prompt the SDK install finalized with OK status.

Now, the GCCE installer can be found under %EPOCROOT%Epoc32\tools\distrib so the next step is to start the install from there with Admin rights. And all goes well.

5) Quick inspection of the tools (like in How do I start programming for Symbian OS?) and environment settings. Since all seems fine is time for ...

6) Carbide.c++ test

The usual restart after detecting the SDKs. Then example project import and build for emulator. All seems ok except for some warnings about non-existing pipe, I guess they are safe to ignore.

Unfortunately here I pause with the good news since I find that the emulator fails to start somewhere in the area of font loading.

Resuming the good news flow the GCCE build worked just fine and I ended up having a signed SIS file.

My conclusions:

- Installing the environment on Vista is not impossible and, at least when it comes to the actual install sequences it does not require any extra effort, maybe just a bit of patience and environment awareness
- Since there are some known problems with the emulator and certain hardware drivers I cannot blame Vista for the emulator problems. Not yet anyway :)
- Despite of the relative success of the test, and even after I'll solve the emulator issue, I still do not see Vista as the OS of choice for Symbian development. If anything I'll try to get back to XP which is more stable, less bloated and more importantly fully supported by the tools.

Update:

Ok, solved the emulator problem too. It was the much debated "FAULT: Exception 0x10000000" problem, with the fix being a change on Vista's Data Execution Protection (DEP) settings.

So, now I have a fully working environment. The next task will be to delete it, but that can wait until tomorrow. ;)

Well, I hope someone will find this useful.

Lucian Tomuta's Forum Nokia Blog

S60 SDK and tools on Windows Vista - a success story