maemo-launcher is a tool to decrease the start-up time of GTK+ and thus gtkmm and maemomm applications. It runs as a daemon and initializes as much as possible before your application begins to start. When a new application is started it is forked from the daemon process, so it starts faster because the initialization is already complete.

maemo-launcher supports multiple booster modules which are responsible for the initialization of various libraries. By default maemo-launcher only supplies a GTK+ booster but a gtkmm and maemomm booster are available from the maemo extras repository (see the section called “Prebuilt Packages”):

  fakeroot apt-get install maemomm-booster

To use the boosters you must specify them when starting maemo-launcher via the command line like this:

maemo-launcher --send-app-died --daemon --booster gtk,gtkmm,maemomm

If you are using the Maemo SDK you may change the option in /etc/init.d/maemo-launcher to look like:

DAEMON_BASE_OPTS="--daemon --send-app-died --booster gtk,gtkmm,maemomm"

so that extra boosters are started automatically when the Maemo desktop is started via:

af-sb-init start

As maemo-launcher tries to load the application using dlopen it must be linked with the -shared and -rdynamic flags. If you are using automake then you can add the following to your Makefile.am (replacing program with the actual name):

program_CFLAGS = -shared
program_LDFLAGS = -shared -rdynamic

To run the maemo-launcher enabled application, use maemo-invoker, like this:

maemo-invoker full/path/to/your/application

Your Debian package should install your application executable as progname.launch and install a shell script progname which calls maemo-invoker. This script could look like this:

#! /bin/sh
exec maemo-invoker /usr/bin/progname.launch "$@"

These three code snippets could be interesting if you want to build Debian packages. Add them to the appropriate section in the debian/rules file. The first snippet belongs in the global section.:

ifeq "$(strip $(LAUNCHER))" "yes"
        LAUNCHER_DEPENDS = -Vlauncher:Depends="maemo-launcher"
        LAUNCHER_CFLAGS = -shared
        LAUNCHER_LDFLAGS = -pie -shared -export-dynamic
endif

build:

        (...)
        # commands to compile the package.
        $(MAKE) \
         MAEMO_LAUNCHER_CFLAGS="$(LAUNCHER_CFLAGS)" \
         MAEMO_LAUNCHER_LDFLAGS="$(LAUNCHER_LDFLAGS)"
        touch build-stamp

install:

        (...)
ifeq "$(strip $(LAUNCHER))" "yes"
        mv $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/bin/progname \
        $(CURDIR)/debian/progname/usr/bin/progname.launch
        ln -s /usr/bin/maemo-invoker \
        $(CURDIR)/debian/progname/usr/bin/progname
endif

To build with launcher support, supply LAUNCHER=yes to the dpkg-buildpackage command line.