Ubuntu Mobile Looks At Qt As GNOME Alternative 262
Derwent sends along a Computerworld piece which begins: "The Ubuntu Mobile operating system is undergoing its most radical change with a port to the ARM processor for Internet devices and netbooks, and may use Nokia's LGPL Qt development environment as an alternative to GNOME. During a presentation at this year's linux.conf.au conference, Canonical's David Mandala said Ubuntu Mobile has changed a lot over the past year... 'I worked on ARM devices for many years so a full Linux distribution on ARM is exciting,' Mandala said, adding one of the biggest challenges is reminding developers to write applications for 800 by 600 screen resolutions found in smaller devices. 'The standard [resolution] for GNOME [apps] is 800 by 600, but not all apps are. For this reason Ubuntu Mobile uses the GNOME Mobile (Hildon framework) instead of a full GNOME desktop, but since Nokia open sourced Qt under the LGPL it may consider this as an alternative.'"
Debian Has Supported ARM For Years (Score:5, Informative)
You mean. for example, Debian GNU/Linux on ARM [debian.org]?
Re:Full 'nix for arm? (Score:1, Informative)
There's already a full 'nix for ARM complete with working packaging and so on, in the form of OpenBSD, just in case anyone has forgotten it.
And Debian. It is basically tied with PowerPC for Debian's third most popular architecture.
Re:"" may "" "" consider "" (Score:4, Informative)
Ok, I'll bite.
Top 10 Reasons GNOME isn't going anywhere:
10. Firefox and Thunderbird are GTK+
9. Konqueror and KHTML, without WebKit, is hobbled by severe rendering and JavaScript bugs
8. GIMP is GTK+
7. The OOo KDE integration, last I checked anyway, was nowhere near as good as the GNOME integration.
6. Pidgin is GTK+ and Kopete is still very immature compared to it.
5. Inkscape is a GTK+/GNOME app.
4. Audacity is GTK+
3. Most of the popular major distros have GNOME as the default desktop (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, etc.)
2. GNOME is easier to use than KDE
and the number one reason GNOME isn't going anywhere:
1. Germans just love David Hasselhoff!
Re:Does he mean 800x480? (Score:3, Informative)
hell, at *small* end its 320x200, either color or with 4 bit greyscale
Re:Whiney complaints (send to /dev/null) (Score:4, Informative)
If you want Qt widely used you need to make it easy to get and install.
They (Qt Software) make it easy to use and install for their intended user-base. Namely: developers
As an end-user you have no business going there.
The applications you are trying to install should be installed using apt-get which will install the needed Qt libs. .deb for the requested app, apt-get ubuntu's libqt4-dev, download the source, go to the source directory where the .pro (project) file is located. run qmake-qt4 in that directory and then run a normal make.
If there's no
It's not that hard, even from sources. Sure, some problems might arise if the app is using features of a newer Qt version than the 1 bundled with your distro. Even that is easy to solve if you are a developer and if you're not, go complain to the author of the app...
Re:What *is* happening? (Score:3, Informative)
I was at the particular session where David spoke. His comment was more along the lines that mobile GUI's were a fast moving target, and Qt may gain more momentum given Nokia acquired it and made it LGPL. (aside, Nokia is now pushing Qt for Symbian/S60 dev)
The comment regarding screen resolution is that the majority of developers haven't designed their GUI under a low res environment, and given that such resolutions are starting to appear again, some work needs to be done.
Re:Full 'nix for arm? (Score:3, Informative)
Throwing more powerful hardware at an unstable game will not fix the bugs.
Unless the defect in the game engine manifests itself only on less powerful hardware. Texture management and shader unimplementation bugs tend to act this way.
While that is technically possible, I've seen Fallout 3 on 8 and 9 series graphics cards with plenty of crashes. Besides, Fallout 3 wouldn't run on a Geforce 3 anyway - I think it is fair to assume the graphics card in question is fairly modern otherwise they would have given up due to framerate issues.
Re:Too big (Score:1, Informative)
"I saw a MIPS based netbook for about US $150"
I guess you mean this:
http://gizmodo.com/5105146/170-alpha-400-mips-netbook-is-as-expensive-as-it-is-desirable
Re:"" may "" "" consider "" (Score:3, Informative)
Pidgin is GTK+ and Kopete is still very immature compared to it.
I was totally onboard with your post until you said Kopete was immature compared to Pidgin...As far as I am concerned the complete opposite is true. I am regularly a Gnome user but I switched to KDE for a few weeks (for reasons beyond my control) and I completely fell in love with Kopete. It matches GAIM/Pidgin feature for feature then adds 100 more on top of that. Just the appearance and skinning options alone dwarf Pidgin's. All the best Pidgin plugins are represented in Kopete too. Plus Kopete has great video device support, a feature the GAIM/Pidgin team has been promising for years but never has managed to deliver. The integrated camera on my Lenovo Thinkpad W500 was supported out of the box. I really wish we could get a gtk version of Kopete over to gnome to give Pidgin a run for it's money....for years now, like ever since the main dev went to work for Google it is as if Pidgin has gone into feature freeze/bug fix only mode...
Re:Full 'nix for arm? (Score:0, Informative)
This refers specifically to Mac OS X. If you read that article, you'd find that they attribute it specifically to the many combinations of special modifier keys that must be pressed.
OS X is notoriously terrible at shortcut keys. You always have to press a ludicrous number of keys to accomplish anything. This is because most of the easily accessible shortcuts are taken up by global functions instead of being context-specific.
For instance, in most IDEs, stepping through code is one button. F9, F10, etc. In Xcode? Shift+Meta+O for step over, Option+Meta+P for continue...
This is because the plain old function keys, among other things are taken up by stupid global shortcuts. Either volume controls, or flipping the windows around, or other dumb shit that is just not used often enough to warrant a whole button on the keyboard. They would be so much more useful if they were specific to the app you're using. Another such pet peeve is the default setting for the middle mouse button, which plops in your Widgets. What a complete waste of a button. It could be so useful if it did something related to, oh I don't know, what you clicked on?!?
Just today, a friend asked me how to take a screenshot of a window. "Press Shift+Meta+4, then press space, then click the window, which will leave a PNG on your desktop." What the fuck is that?
I think if you did a little more research, you'd find that this speed issue is directly due to Apple's horrible choices of keyboard shortcuts across the entire operating system. I'd love to see similar research on text-editing with a mouse compared to something like vi instead of Mac's stupid shortcuts.
Re:Nokia open sourced Qt under the LGPL (Score:3, Informative)
It was certainly not a traditional GPL software development toolkit in the sense of the restrictions placed on the developer.
Of course it was, it's the GPL, nothing more, nothing less.
What you are referring to is a condition of the commercial license, (to prevent you from finally buying 1 single license to release your 20-man-years-application commercially). You are free to accept, reject, or try and renegotiate the conditions of this commercial license. If you don't like them, stick with the GPL, it's your choice.
Practicality of enforcing such a restriction in the commercial license notwithstanding.
Re:Qt is *NOT* Gnome alternative itself (Score:5, Informative)
Hildon is GTK for Mobile Devices. It was developped by Nokia. One distribution that uses this the most is Maemo. Considering Maemo is a Nokia-motivated (read coded/funded) project, and that Nokia bought Trolltech and told them to GPL Qt, they now have an extra incentive to boost Qt adoption. One of the tactics used to boost Qt adoption is that from their next version of Maemo (code named Fremantle), the UI is going to be moving from Hildon to Qt. Fremantle will still be using the Hildon libraries, but the version after Fremantle (Harmattan?) will include the Qt libraries by default, and will be officially supported.
Considering that Hildon is very closely entied to Maemo, if Maemo drops its use (read: if Nokia drops it), keeping it up to date is going to be a hard task, which is probably why UbuntuM is switching to Qt as well, as they don't want to have to maintain the UI library on their own; quite the smart move.
We've seen full Linux distributions running on ARM platforms for quite a while. Yes, Debian works, Maemo does as well, and some people might even be intersted in projects such as Mer (Mer is project that forked from Maemo and that is basically the Maemo community yelling at Nokia that they'd better not drop support for the n800/n810 in Fremantle, as they're proving they could very well take care of themselves --software wise-- and that they won't buy new devices just because Nokia wants them to). We've even seen fully fledged KDE desktops run on the n8x0, or Android for that matter.
The main problem on these devices is the lack of support for languages like C++. Yes, we have libhildonmm (C++ bindings for Hildon), but this is all pretty limited. They don't add the flexibility and power that Qt has; and they most probably won't ever do so. At this point, the devices are too slow to even think about compiling C++ on it, so most people default to shit languages like Python.
But I digress, let me summarise:
- Nokia created Hildon, and Maemo.
- Maemo uses Hildon.
- Ubuntu Mobile came along, liked Hildon and said "Hey, let's use that!".
- Nokia bought Trolltech, that develop Qt.
- Nokia is switching Maemo to use Qt instead of Hildon.
- Ubuntu Mobile doesn't want to hold on to the losing end, and switches to Qt before Hildon dies.
Re:Full 'nix for arm? (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, it would be nice to see a proper "full" linux distribution.
You might want to look at Debian [debian.org]. It has been running on ARM for quite a while.
Merging Qt and Gtk (Score:3, Informative)
There is an ongoing discussion [ubuntuforums.org] about the possibility of porting Gnome 3 to use the Qt toolkit over at Ubuntu Forums.
There also exists an Ubuntu Brainstorm Idea [ubuntu.com] with several possible solutions, with Solution #4: Change Qt to render using the Gtk widgets my favorite.
Err... (Score:3, Informative)
You mean something like this [trolltech.com]? It's already in HEAD and will ship with Qt 4.5.