Deploying an Application on the Symbian Platform

Shared Libraries

After ensuring that Qt is built as a shared library, we can build the Wiggly application. First, we must go into the directory that contains the application:

 cd examples\widgets\wiggly

To prepare the application for deployment we must ensure that the .pkg file generated by qmake contains the relevant vendor information and embeds the necessary dependencies to the application deployment file (.sis). The content of the generated .pkg file can be controlled with the Symbian specific qmake DEPLOYMENT keyword extensions.

First, we will change the vendor statement to something more meaningful. The application vendor is visible to end-user during the installation.

 vendorinfo = \
     "%{\"Example Localized Vendor\"}" \
     ":\"Example Vendor\""

 my_deployment.pkg_prerules = vendorinfo
 DEPLOYMENT += my_deployment

Second we will tell the Symbian application installer that this application supports only S60 5.0 based devices:

 supported_platforms = \
     "; This demo only supports S60 5.0" \
     "[0x1028315F],0,0,0,{\"S60ProductID\"}"

 default_deployment.pkg_prerules -= pkg_platform_dependencies
 my_deployment.pkg_prerules += supported_platforms
 DEPLOYMENT += my_deployment

You can find a list of platform and device indentification codes from Forum Nokia Wiki. By default .pkg file generated by qmake adds support for all S60 3rd edition FP1, S60 3rd edition FP2 and S60 5th edition devices.

Now we are ready to compile the application and create the application deployment file. Run qmake to create Symbian specific makefiles, resources (.rss) and deployment packaging files (.pkg). And do build to create the application binaries and resources.

 qmake
 make release-gcce

If everything compiled and linked without any errors, we are now ready to create an application installation package (wiggly_installer.sis).

If you haven't done so already, download the latest release of the Smart Installer from http://get.qt.nokia.com/nokiasmartinstaller/, and install it on top of the Qt package

Then use this command to create the installer sis package:

 make installer_sis

If all binaries and dependencies were found, you should now have a self signed wiggly_installer.sis ready to be installed on a device. The smart installer contained in the in the installer package will download the necessary dependencies such as Qt libraries to the device.

Note: If you want to have your application properly Symbian Signed for distribution, you will have to properly sign both the application and the application installer packages. Please see Forum Nokia Wiki for more information about Symbian Signed.

For more information about creating a .sis file and installing it to device see also here.