Creating a mobile guided tour application for the Android platform

One nice thing about a Linux development environment is package management. Anything you could possibly ever want is just a download away.

However, there are a LOT of downloads.  Kernel.  The X Windowing System and GNOME.  VM Guest Additions.  GCC and Kernel-Sources for compiling said guest additions – they’re kernel objects.  Apache, PHP, and MySQL.  WordPress.  Eclipse.  The Android SDK.  Android SDK Components and images.

In fact, I’m still downloading.  At least I didn’t need to compile much – trying to hack a newer kernel into CentOS for OpenGL support took over an hour of compile time and broke GRUB.  Hooray for VM snapshots!

Although I finally have a fully-configured IDE, “Hello World” might have to wait ’til the morrow.

I retract my previous statement about VirtualBox’s RDP server. Although VRDP was impressive over the LAN, my upstream bandwidth leaves something to be desired. It was great fun trying to remotely change Gnome’s screen resolution – the 15-second revert timer would count down before the screen could redraw, and the resolution would change back.

A few times back and forth of that and suddenly my page went offline. Remote desktop would connect and authenticate but served up a meditative quantity of inky darkness.

Turns out I crashed the virtual machine. Seems VRDP is rather finicky.

Moved journal and website over to a WordPress installation.  That’s right; I upgraded the Web from 1.0 to 2.0.

This sits on a CentOS virtual machine that will also serve as my primary development environment.  VirtualBox has a very snappy RDP server, meaning I can log into the VM and do Android development from any XP or later computer with the standard Windows Remote Desktop client.

This somewhat eliminates the need for SVN as well.  Naturally, I’m the only developer on my project, so source control won’t be quite as important.

All that remains is configuring Eclipse for use with the Android SDK.