running Groovy on the Nokia N900
My favorite gadget for the last few months is definitely the Nokia N900. It’s a geeky device with a real Linux OS aboard. In opposite to it’s locked down competitors, the N900 runs Maemo, a platform consisting (mostly) of open source software. So I wonder if it’s possible to use Groovy on that. And yes, it is possible!Unfortunately the Maemo platform doesn’t contain a JVM by itself. Some days ago, I saw a tweet that there a OpenJDK port for ARM. All you have to do, is downloading the JDK and JRE from this page, bunzip it and move the directory to the N900. The next step is downloading Groovy and setting the envionment variables
export JAVA_HOME=<jdk-dir> export GROOVY_HOME=<groovy-dir> export PATH=$GROOVY_HOME/bin:$PATH
With that, it’s possible to run all the stuff in $GROOVY_HOME/bin, e.g. the groovyConsole on the N900. It terribly slow, the groovyConsole takes abount 60 secs to come up, the keyboard has a very long lag when typing – but it works!
Anyone else got a ‘groovy’ smartphone?
Well the other day i saw a thread about running clojure same way on the N900, there is also a Sun JVM for ARM but not for free…
Hi Stefan,
I installed groovy too on the fantastic n900. Only I have Icedtea6 directly from the repository Maemo extras-devel (or Maemo Extras) and it works well.
groovyConsole is painfully slow, but groovysh works with no problems!
Luigi, thanks for the info. At the time of writing, icedtea was not available in the repos. I’ll install it asap.