Thursday, April 21, 2005

More Perl for Series 60

Following on from Monday's inital release of Perl for Series 60 Jarkko Hietaniemi has established a SourceForge project for the release.
Currently it contains the patch as I sent it here few days ago and then a .zip containing the SIS files for the Symbian (compiled with Series 60 2.6 SDK). Read the "INSTALL" file contained in the .zip for details.

I think I better underline the fact that this is just the port of the base language, so one does not get to play with the Series 60 or phone specific APIs as one does with the "Python for Series 60" published through Forum Nokia.

While this is still just a release of the base language, and we still don't have a Series 60/Symbian framework as you do with the Python port, this goes a long way towards an "official" release from Nokia which presumably will have an application framework. In the meantime there are still a lot of fun stuff we can do with the bare language. I didn't have enough time to build my own binary release, but I've definitely got enough time to play with one now Jarkko has done the hard work for us...

Update: I've managed to successfully install and get the binary distribution working on my Nokia 6600.

 
Perl running on my Nokia 6600, it's been a long time coming...

I did have some initial trouble with the installation as one of the four SIS files needed by the installtion, perlapp.sis, crashed the installer program. I also got a persistent General Error which meant I couldn't delete the file out of my inbox, and I had to go in with FExplorer and delete the message by hand from the C:\system\Mail\ directory. I've had this sort of problem before and I'm usure whether it is a memory issue, or is due to permissions problems. However, once I'd deleted the (corrupted?) first copy by hand, I transferred across a second copy and this installed just fine. So your milage may vary...

Since the binaries were compiled using SDK 2.6 I don't think they're going to work on my other Series 60 phone, a Nokia 3650, but I'll have a go later tonight and report back...

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