Slashdot Mirror

You don't know them enough. Nokia always chooses whatever fits to that particular product. Netbook? Windows for them.

It is not like Nokia is your average Windows hater company. It is kinda blurry on OS X with iSync etc. but Nokia smart phones best works with Windows on the other end. It is basic as that. Their Nokia Multimedia Transfer (still beta) could have been released for OS X but there is nothing to fill PC Suite's place on OS X. I would be very very surprised if they contributed a single line to KDE's sync solutions, even after Qt acquisition.

This is a company who pays millions to Trolltech (while they are doing extremely fine) and release first Qt for S60 demo in .exe form! After I see that page (link below) I went to all IRC channels I frequent to take my "Use Nokia, it is cool with Python, open, Qt is coming too" suggestions back. For most people, it is Ovi App store which made people lose their hopes. For me? It was that basic blog entry meant no harm but showed what kind of waste Nokia did by purchasing Qt. Thank God, Qt is GPL and already has gigantic prestige in commercial development with a huge community on Linux&BSD.

http://pepper.troll.no/s60prereleases/

I am sure they forced the early release, something OTHER THAN WINDOWS will be supported at one point but just imagine a Qt&Linux developers face when he is greeted with .exe with the excuse of emulator being WINDOWS ONLY. I really hope Nokia is more ashamed than me. Yes, I actually feel ashamed for doing their PR work to Developers for free, with information making complete sense but wrong.

Well, the now Nokia-owned former-Trolltech Qt Software's Qt toolkit is being ported to symbian as we speak (with a pre-release out already). The OpenMoko project is also switching to Qt, and since Qt 4 is a superb multi-platform toolkit, it might get ported to other mobile platforms as well. So in the future, perhaps using only Qt would suffice. That were great, because I think Qt 4 is really amazing! :)

OpenMoko and the 1973 will fail just as the Greenphone did. There is no leadership behind the project, no vision, just a bunch of well-intentioned geeks who want to make something cool. With no cohesive plan, though, the Neo1973 will never succeed.

1. If OpenMoko doesn't succeed, it will be largely because of posts like the above. Enough negative sentiment will doom any project, however cool.
2. OpenMoko isn't a product, it's a platform. Sure, the Neo1973 isn't the all-time ultimate mobile phone - it's a development platform. That's why in addition to the pre-built phone you get a development board you can house in your own enclosure with your own battery, screen, and other hardware bits. If you don't like Neo1973, build your own phone round the platform.
3. When I first started using Linux in 1993, doomsayers were saying it was obsolete and would never fly. Guess what? They were wrong.

I'm not saying OpenMoko is the world's ultimate phone project. Of course it isn't. But it's a good, big start, and it deserves support. If you don't support it, don't complain if, in ten years time, all you can get are closed, proprietary phones you can't even load your own software on.

You know, I'm getting old. I belong to a generation which, when someone gave us cool hardware, we grabbed and built cool software on top of it. Now, if it isn't all pretty and polished right out of the box, it gets condemned as rubbish. Guess what? Linus Torvalds was just a college kid when he wrote the first kernel. His professors didn't even rate him as very good. Certainly no-one thought he had leadership potential. And as for a cohesive plan, his cohesive plan was to build a scheduler which could schedule two tasks.

Stuff happens. It will surprise you. OpenMoko may, indeed, not be a great success. But if it's a bit of a success, other people will be able to come along and build on it - it is open source. In fact, that's already happening - that's what this story is about. The GreenPhone is not 'dead', it has mutated. Instead of building their own hardware platform, the Trolls are developing the 'green suite' on the OpenMoko platform. So you can still have your greenphone - the only thing is, it will be black and silver, or white and orange.

Qt Open Source Edition is licensed under the GPL from a long time ago. http://troll.no/products/qt/licenses/licensing/opensource

It seems to me that it's better to go for a Qtopia based device instead.

They can be reached through this website. Need I say more?

Jokes aside, Qt NetHack is actually pretty cool. :-)

I play Nethack on my Sharp Zaurus SL5500.

Screenshots and other info here.

that's why we have things like accessability in the mainstream GNOME (and KDE?)

Accessibility is exactly one of the areas where integration makes a lot of sense. This is why the KDE anhd GNOME accessibilty teams work very closely together, sharing the same library (Sun's ATK). A first snapshot of the work Trolltech is doing to fully integrate Qt/KDE applications with Sun's accessibility framework is already available.

Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility Project

Precisely. The infrastructure now exists in KDE, which is a tremendous step to getting it "accessibility ready", but if you look at screenshots like this screeshot you'll find that the applications aren't giving very much accessibility information to ATK yet :)

Still, lets not underplay this announcement. Linux is on the way to becoming "The desktop that cares" and usable by people who can't use non-accessibility-ready desktops.

accessibility
GTK integration

• MNG plugin for Mozilla-based Win32 browsers
  
• MNG plugin for Linux/x86 libc6

I don't think radio comms are that intresting for the vast mayority of users, except for possibly the cellid information. However, This thing is pretty useless if it can't run standard qt/embedded ( c++ ) apps. The apis and performance J2ME gives are simply too limited.

kstars opera, nethack, gpsdrive ssh, vnc, qt-rdesktop, irc etc are stuff that would be very hard to implement in MIDP, while they are ALREADY available for qt/embedded, probably needing just small display size tweaks.

While we are at it, could it be possible get some screenshots of this device? so far I've only seen the marketing pics of it.

I mean, if you want to use Windows applications, just install the Windows that came free with your computer. For the cost of Win4Lin or Wine, you can get a whole nother hard drive to dedicate to Windows, and it will be fully compatible.

Yes, but that means you have to dual boot... I stopped doing that a decade ago. It was a PITA, and you lose state -- if I'm working on something in one window, and need to work on something else, I shouldn't need to reboot. I often leave 3-4 windows up with development stuff (code, running programs, log files, etc) while going off to do other stuff. If I have to reboot in order to do "other stuff" then I have to quit out of any files I'm editing, close all my windows, and reboot... odds are I won't remember precisely where I was in the coding cycle when I come back to it unless those windows are still present.

It would be even worse if the documentation for the project (largely in Word docs, some in a wiki) meant I had to reboot everytime I wanted to view the latest copy.

Dual booting is a kludge IMO.

On a related note, how come there are no Linux emulators for Windows? Is it because Windows has better alternatives to any Linux program, or is there some sort of GPL patent issue?

Nice troll.

It's because the Linux/Unix/POSIX APIs are clearly documented and well known (which is not true for the Windows libraries). In fact, Windows uses most of the very same system calls. Many Linux programs are portable and can be compiled not only on other Unix systems, but also on Windows. Cygwin is a port of the basic Unix libraries and a boatload of Unix utilities, along with an X/Windows Server, to Windows... there are also cross-compilable graphics toolkits like Qt that help in porting graphical apps.

The better bit is particularly funny... the best Oracle client I've used is TOra, which was originally developed for Linux and cross-compiled to Windows. The best MP3 tagger I've found is EasyTag, only available on Unix systems. Most of the better programming tools are Unix oriented, with backports to Windows (if ported at all).

• Linux Networx
• Luxul
• Altiris
• Cerberian
• Cogito
• Communitect
• Data Crystal
• Digital Harbor
• Perimeter Labs
• Mi Co

And, of course, the Trolls.

What do all these companies have in common? They're geek companies. They employ geeks, and they sell to geeks. What geeks think of them matters to them and can hurt them. If you're doing business with any of these companies, tell the people you're dealing with that you're not happy with SCO's behaviour, and that your unhappiness is sufficient to start you re-evaluating their competitors.

It's also worth pointing out that several of these companies are making use of the Linux[tm] brand, including one of them using it in it's name. The owner of the Linux[tm] brand has it within his power to have a quiet word with them, although, of course, that's entirely up to him.

You definitely forgot Qt. The only downside is that it's commercial on Win32 (unless you're running MSVC6), apart from that it does its job very well, and has a very reasonable OpenGL widget.

As for wxWindows (which others have suggested), I tried it some time ago and I think it truly sucked. Hopefully it has improved since then :-)

/* Steinar */

Yes, I know, another "here's a solution to a problem you don't quite have" post, but maybe it will help justify somebody's purchase of the fantastic PDA.

As most of you desktop users already know, the KDE Project recently released KDE 3.1beta2, which will be the final development release before KDE 3.1. The good news is, KDE 3.1 is scheduled for release in just a few weeks.

KDE 3.1, the strongest KDE release to date, promises new goodies for just about everyone who gets to enjoy the full KDE desktop experience. Here is a sampling of what is in store for you:

Browsing with Tabs. The many fans of tabbed browsing will be delighted by this new addition to the KDE web browser ( Konqueror ) (screenshot). To simplify downloading a large number of files, a new download manager (KGET), which fully integrates into Konqueror, has joined the network package (kdenetwork). It manages any number of downloads in one window, where transfers can be added, removed, paused, resumed, queued or scheduled. A dialog displays transfer status, including progress, size, speed and estimated time to completion.

Eye Candy. The artistically-inclined KDE contributors have showered us with a basket of new eye candy. As shown in this screenshot, KDE 3.1 will ship with the contemporary Crystal icon set as well as the original new Keramik theme. The screenshot also shows the new drop-shadows. To help manage these stunning themes, KDE will provide a new theme manager with improved theme style and color decoration previews (screenshot). Menus and other desktop windows can also use attractive drop shadows, as shown in the screenshot above.

Personal Information Management. On the PIM front, the email client ( KMail ) has gained several privacy and security enhancements - namely S/MIME, PGP/MIME and X.509v3 support - in collaboration with the Aegypten project, an IT security project sponsored by the German government (screenshot). The calendar / scheduling application (KOrganizer) features a new Exchange 2000 plugin. The address book (KAddressbook) has gained the ability to fetch contact information from one or more LDAP servers. It can also print contact information and import industry-standard vCards.

While not included in the 3.1 release, the next quantum jump in KDE's email / groupware architecture is scheduled for KDE 3.2, when KDE will ship a completely copy-lefted, integrated groupware system. Currently known as the Kroupware Project, it is being sponsored by the German government and will integrate the major KDE PIM applications (screenshot, screenshot). More about this project, and some additional screenshots, can be found on the dot. KDE 3.2 will also feature the ability to use Vim as the mail composer (screenshot).

File Management. The file manager (Konqueror) has a number of new goodies, such as folder icons which reflect a folder's contents, a video thumbnail generator and a number of plugins for providing enhanced- or meta-information about various file types (e.g., images, binary packages, source code). The file search utility can now search file meta-information for searching multi-media files.

Desktop Sharing. For those who switch work stations frequently, KDE offers a new VNC-compatible desktop sharing framework. It enables users to share a KDE desktop across multiple machines (screenshot).*

Enterprise. Enterprises, Internet cafes and similar users will appreciate enhancements to the KDE Kiosk framework (the Kiosk framework provides an easy way to disable certain features within KDE to create a more controlled environment). In addition, the panel (Kicker) now supports fully customized menus.

Multimedia. The multimedia framework (kdemultimedia) has a new video decoder based on Xine. Xine is a video framework which provides support for various video formats, such as AVI, DivX, Cinepak, Sorenson Video, MPEG 1/2 and 4, QuickTime / MOV, ASF and others.

Games. For the playful among us, KDE 3.1 will offer a number of new games in the games package (kdegames), including a golf game ( Kolf ) (screenshot), an Atlantik and Monopoly-type game ( Atlantik ), a Blackjack game ( Megami ). and a Same-like game ( Klickery ).

Ease of Use. A number of other improvements are meant simply to make the desktop easier to use and configure. For example, the application finder (KAppfinder) provides a nice tree view for selecting the applications to include in the KDE desktop menu hierarchy. Two new user notification methods have also been added for providing non-obtrusive informational messages: a passive popup window (KPassivePopup), which pops up next to the application's entry in the panel's taskbar (without stealing the focus), as well as messages which appear in an application's title-bar (KWindowInfo). In addition, the control center (KControl) has received a face lift and better organization (screenshot).

Miscellaneous. Of course work under the hood continues for KDE 3.1 as well. It provides a number of speed improvements, such as Konqueror start-up time, a number of usability enhancements by the KDE Usability Project, as well as almost 1,000 critter fixes.

More information about planned KDE 3 features is available for KDE 3.1 and KDE 3.2.

Some interesting KDE statistics: the KDE CVS source code repository consists of about 2.6 million lines of code (LOC) (for comparison, the GNU/Linux kernel version 2.5.29 consists of about 3.1 million lines of code). The KDE Project consists of hundreds of active contributors, with 300 of them translating KDE into over 70 languages (KDE 3.0.4 shipped in 51 languages). In May 2002 over 11,014 CVS commits were executed. The KDE website has 24 official mirrors in 16 countries and the KDE FTP site has 71 official mirrors in 30 countries.

--
Evan (no references)

--
Evan (no references)

--
Evan (no references)

and the basis for KDE (and, indeed, current versions of Opera). Qt is Norwegian.

TrollTech especially is becoming a very important player in the software industry. They are at the vanguard of fighting Microsoft in both the desktop space with Qt/KDE and in the embedded space with Qt/embedded and Qtopia (as used in the Sharp Zaurus). They are already a great advertisement for and asset to Norway, and if they can keep it up could easily become one of the most important software companies in the world.

In this light I'm not suprised at all that the Norwegian government is opening up to alternatives. By supporting the local software industry, Norway can a) reduce its imports of foreign proprietary software, b) help increase its exports of software, and c) reduce the reliance on all forms of proprietary software (both TrollTech and Opera are extremely Linux and free software friendly). This adds up to a boost for the Norwegian economy, secures local jobs and increases tax revenues flowing to the government. All in all a big win for Norway.

Let's hope the Norwegians really do take it a stage further and start choosing some of their own software. It's a big leap to make but ultimately the Norwegian people will benefit.

I haven't tried it, but there is a Nethack port for the Sharp Zaurus and the Compaq iPAQ.

Holy shit that site actually exists!

Hi,

I'm going to unabashedly karma whore for a second because Nethack is my favourite game ever. I can't tell you the number of hours I wasted playing this (or other rogue-like games, such as rogue, larn, adom, or omega).

Here are some links to get you all started:

Nethack.org

One of the first and best Nethack pages, from the legenday Boudewijn Waijers

another Nethack homepage

A newer Nethack page

QT Nethack

An impressive graphical Nethack

The google Roguelike directory entry

the classic rec.games.roguelike.nethack

Happy hacking!

Of course there are GUI's. There is the Commond Desktop Environment (much too exensive), Looking Glas (not too expensive but not really the solution), and several free X-Filemanagers that are almost GUI's. Moxfm for example is very well done, but unfortunately it is based on Motif. Anyway, the question is: What is a GUI? What should a GUI be?

First of all, since there are a lot of missunderstandings on this topic, what is NOT a GUI:

• the X-Window-System is NOT a GUI. It's what its name says: A Window system
• Motif is NOT a GUI. They tried to create a GUI when they made Motif, but unfortunately they couldn't really agree, so they released Motif as Widget-Library with a Window-Manager. Much later they completed Motif with the CDE, but too late, since Windows already runs on the majority of desktops.
• Window-managers are NOT GUI's. They are (better: should be) small programs that handle the windows. It's not really the idea to hack a lot of stuff into them.

IMHO a GUI should offer a complete, graphical environment. It should allow a users to do his everyday tasks with it, like starting applications, reading mail, configuring his desktop, editing some files, delete some files, look at some pictures, etc. All parts must fit together and work together. A nice button with a nice "Editor"-icon is not at all a graphical user environment if it invokes "xterm -e vi". Maybe you have been disappointed long time ago too, when you installed X with a nice window manager, clicked on that beautiful "Help"-Icon ... chrk chrk (the hard disk)...an ugly, unsuable, weird xman appeared on the desktop :-( A GUI for endusers The idea is NOT to create a GUI for the complete UNIX-system or the System-Administrator. For that purpose the UNIX-CLI with thousands of tools and scripting languages is much better. The idea is to create a GUI for an ENDUSER. Somebody who wants to browse the web with Linux, write some letters and play some nice games.

I really believed that is even yet possible with Linux until I configured my girlfriends Box. Well, I didn't notice anymore that I work with lots of different kind of menues, scrollbars and textwidgets. I already know that some widgets need to be under the mouse when they should get the keyevents, some sliders wants the middle mouse for dragging and some textwidgets only want emacs-bindings and don't understand keys like "pos1" or "end". And selecting some text is different everywere, too. Even the menues and buttons (for exampel Xaw, Fvwm, XForms, Motif) behave completely different.

One word to the Athena-Widgets: Although there are a few nice applications available that uses these "widgets" we should really get rid of them. Thinking that "Athena is a widget-library" is a similar missunderstanding like "X is a GUI". Athena is an very old example how widget libraries could be implemented with Xlib and Xt. It's more or less a online-documentation for Widget-Set-Programmers, but not a tool for application-programmers. Unfortunately, the old Unix problem, a so good online-documentation that people used it for applications.

So one of the major goals is to provide a modern and common look&feel for all the applications. And this is exactly the reason, why this project is different from elder attempts.

Since a few weeks a really great new widget library is available free in source and price for free software development. Check out http://www.troll.no

The stuff is called "Qt" and is really a revolution in programming X. It's an almost complete, fully C++ Widget-library that implementes a slightly improved Motif look and feel, or, switchable during startup, Window95.

The fact that it is done by a company (Troll Tech) is IMO a great advantage. We have the sources and a superb library, they have beta testers. But they also spend their WHOLE TIME in improving the library. They also give great support. That means, Qt is also interesting for commercial applications. A real alternative to the terrible Motif :) But the greatest pro for Qt is the way how it is programmed. It's really a very easy-to-use powerfull C++-library.

Qt is also portable, yet to Windows95/NT, but you do not have to worry about that. It's very easy to use UNIX/X specific things in programming, so that porting to NT is hardly possible :-)

I really recommend looking at this library. It has IMO the power to become the leading library for free software development. And it's a way to escape the TCL/TK monsters that try to slow down all our processors and eat up our memory...

It's really time yet to standarize the desktop somewhat. It's nonsense to load 10 different widgets into memory for the same task. Imagine this desktop:

• fvwm (own widgets)
• rxvt (own widgets)
• tgif (own widgets)
• xv (own widgets)
• ghostview (athena widgets)
• lyx (xforms widgets)
• xftp (motif widgets)
• textedit (xview widgets)
• arena (own widgets)

One may argue that a usual UNIX-Box has enough memory to handle all these different kind of widgets. Even if this might be correct, the really annoying thing is, that all these widgets (menus, buttons, scrollbars, etc.) behave slightly different. And this isn't only an academic example, I've really seen such desktops :-}

I know we couldn't get rid of this chaos at once, but my dream is a coexistance between Motif and Qt. The Kool Desktop Environment (KDE) I don't have the time to do this all alone (also since LyX is my main project). But a thing like a Desktop Environment can easily be cut into lots of parts. There is very probably a part for you, too! If you want to learn some X-programming, why not doing a small, neat project for the KDE? If you know others who like to programm something, please prevend them from writing the 1004th tetris games or the 768th minesweeper clone ;-) Think we also have enough XBiffs yet...

So here is my project list so far. Probably there are even more things to do that would fit great into the KDE. It's a very open project. Panel: The basic application. Run's as FvwmModule (at the beginning). Offers a combination between Windows95 and CDE. I think about a small taskbar at the bottom and a kind of CDE-panel on the top of the screen. The panel has graphical icon menus on the left (similar to GoodStuff) to launch applications, 4 buttons in the middle to switch to other virtual desktops and few icons for often needed applications on the right. There is for example a mail-icon that also indicates new mail, a wastebasket to open the delete-folder (that also indicates when it isn't empty and is capable of drag'n'drop). Maybe a analog clock with date at the very right. Also a nice special icon for exiting the environment or locking the screen. All the stuff is completly configurable via GUI. I'm also thinking about solutions, that only available applications can be installed on the desktop and that new applications appear on the desktop automatically.

I started to work on this panel, but would of course love some help. There are also lot of smaller things to do, like a tool to chose a background pixmap (for each virtual desktop) etc.

Also nice icons are needed!

Filemanager Another major application inside the KDE. The idea is not to create a powerful high-end graphical bash-replacement (like tkdesk tries to be), but a nice looking easy-to-use filemanager for simple tasks. Simple tasks are mainly deleting some files, copying some files, copying some files to floppy disk, starting applications by clicking on a file (for example ghostview for postscript files or xli for gifs, etc).

I'm thinking about nice windows, one for each directory, that shows icons for every file. It should be possible to drag files around (either copy or move), even between different windows. Another important point is the support of the floppy-disk, so that mounting/umounting is done user-transparent.

Dragging of icons should be done in a nice way, that means moving around a special window (see Qt's xshape example), NOT like xfm or xfilemanager by setting another monochrome bitmap for the cursor.

So it will also be possible to put files as icons on the desktop. This is IMO a very nice feature. Since applications are launched by the panel, it's even clear that icons are real data-objects. With fvwm-1 and the FvwmFileMgr it wasn't really clear wether an icon is yet a file or an iconified window.

Drag'n'drop inside a Qt application isn't really difficult. The filemanager is IMO a very nice and not too time consuming project. Who wants?

mail client A really comfortable mailclient. IMO the most comfortable mailclient for X is yet XF-Mail. And the author is willing to port it to Qt when the KDE-project will start! But he asks for some assitance (for example for coding the small popups, etc.)

easy texteditor Very small but important project. An editor that fits the needs of those who have to edit a textfile once in a month and didn't find the time yet to learn vi (and don't have the time to wait for x-emacs to start, and don't have the memory to use a motif-static-nedit, and don't have the cpu-power and memory to use a tk-monster like tkedit,...)

Unfortunatly the Qt multiline-textwidget isn't available in Qt-1.0, but Troll-Tech already announced the beta-testing. So the texteditor can be started in a few weeks, too.

Terminal Similar to the CDE terminal program. A kind of xterm with nice menu bar to set the font, exit, etc. Nice project, get the xterm sources and add a GUI with Qt!

Image viewer The application that will be launced as default from the filemanager for gifs, jpegs and all this. Well, xv is shareware and really needs quite a long time for startup. But there is a plain Xlib programm without any menues or buttons called "xli". Get the sources and make it userfriendly with Qt!

Lots of small other tools:

• xdvi with Qt-Gui
• ghostview with Qt-Gui
• xmag with Qt-Gui
• whatever you want

BTW: There is a Troll Tech Qt-competition (look at their webpages). The best application (not only functionallity, but also design counts. Just porting an existing great application to Qt won't probably be enough :-( ) wins $2000 and a few Qt on NT licenses (worth another $2000). They also mentioned a browser-project as an example. So a nice HTML-browser in Qt, ready in Janurary may be worth $4000 (This includes selling the unneeded NT licenses ;-) )

Window Manager At the beginning, the KDE panel will work as an Fvwm-Module. When this is done, a lot of stuff can be stripped from the bloated fvwm window manager. We don't need anymore fvwm-menus, icon handling and zillions of configurable things. We need a small, realiable windowmanager. So maybe stripping all unncessary stuff from fvwm will make sense in a while. But this may come very last.

System Tools Whatever a user, or you, might need. A graphical passwd comes to my mind. But probably there are a lot more! Maybe this will lead to a small system administration tool someday.

Games We have yet a nice tetris game (an Qt example program). What is needed is a nice set of small games like solitaire (please with nice cards that can be really dragged!). There are several nice card games available for X, for example xpat2. So why not take the cards from them and write a real solitaire games, very similar to MS-Solitaire. I really had to install Wine sometimes just to play solitair, what an overhead! But other games are needed, too. Take xmris, pacman, etc. add a nice GUI. Or write some from scratch. Whatever you want :)

Icons A set of nice icons. 3D-pixmaps are quite a good start (but why should the button be inside a pixmap, if we use a toolkit with buttons???)

Documentation A documentation project is always a good thing to have. But before we should clearify how the hypertext help system should look like. We can then start with documentation pages in the chosen HTML-subset and for example use arean as help browser. Anyway we need some application to document first.

Web-Pages / Ftp Server / Aministration We need a server for the files and webpages that inform about the state of the project. Especially what projects are currently worked on and what projects still wait for somebody to do them. I set up a preliminary homepage on http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/et trich that just contains this posting yet and a few links. I may setup real webpages for the very beginning but I would be very happy if I could concentrate on discussion and coding. So if there is someone out there in the net who likes to design and maintain webpages, here is a job for him :)

Discussion The most important topic :-) If you are interested please join the mailing list kde@kde.org

Subscribing can be done by sending a mail with in *Body*: subscribe [your email address]
to
kde-request@kde.org

Applications When the KDE gets widely accepted, new (free) applications will hopefully be based on Qt, too, to fit with the comfortable and pleasant look and feel of the desktop.

We may for example port LyX to Qt, so that a comfortable wordprocessor is available. But that is still in discussion in the LyX Team.

A nice vector-orientated drawing tool would also be fine. Well, Xfig is a powerful but ugly monster. But there is "tgif", a very powerful, easy to use but ugly program. The author doesn't like the idea of adding a Qt GUI for the menus, icons and scrollbars, since Qt is C++ and he wants to keep tgif plain C, since on some sites no C++ compiler is available. Well, the KDE doesn't really aim on these old and weird UNIX boxes (also I think a g++ is almost everywhere available). But maybe the tgif-author agrees when somebody else adds a nice GUI to tgif (the sources are free, don't know wether this is GPL). Since tgif yet implements its own GUI this shouldn't be too difficult. It's really easy with Qt to access plain Xlib functionality and functions, so not very much will have to be rewritten. Also C++ makes it very easy to include plain C code.

What about an easy to use, nice newsreader similar to knews? Could also be integrated into the KDE. ... and ... and ... and.

So there is a lot of work (and fun) to do! If you are interested, please join the mailing list. If we get about 20-30 people we could start. And probably before 24th December the net-community will give itself another nice and longtime-needed gift.

The stuff will be distributed under the terms of the GPL.

I admit the whole thing sounds a bit like fantasy. But it is very serious from my side. Everybody I'm talking to in the net would LOVE a somewhat cleaner desktop. Qt is the chance to realize this. So let us join our rare sparetime and just do it!

Hopefully looking foward to lots of followups and replies! Regards,

Matthias Ettrich
(ettrich@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de)

BTW: Usually these postings get a lot of answers like "Use a Mac if you want a GUI, CLI rules!", "I like thousands of different widgets-libraries on my desktop, if you are too stupid to learn them, you should use windoze", "RAM prices are so low, I only use static motif programs", "You will never succeed, so better stop before the beginning", "Why Qt? I prefer schnurz-purz-widgets with xyz-lisp-shell. GPL! Check it out!", etc. Thanks for not sending these as followup to this posting :-) I know I'm a dreamer...

BTW2: You might wonder why I'm so against Tk. Well, I don't like the philosophy: Tk's doesn't have a textwidget, for example, but a slow wordprocessor. Same with other widgets. In combination with TCL the programs become slow and ugly (of course there are exceptions). I didn't yet see any application that uses Tk from C++ or C, although an API seems to exist. TCL/TK is very usefull for prototyping. Ideal for example for kernel configuration. And since Tk looks little similar to Motif, the widgets are also quite easy to use. But I really don't like any TCL/Tk application to stay permanantly on the desktop. And Qt is much easier (at least as easy) to program. Check it out!

BTW3: I don't have any connections to Troll Tech, I just like their product (look at the sources: really high quality!) and their kind of marketing: free sourcecode for free software. Original document by Matthias Ettrich,
HTMLized by Matt McLeod

QT is not the best way to go for some people. QT is GPL on Linux doesn't make it the preferable platform. Poor people want to develop commercial products and sell them. They can't do it with QT, and not everybody is willing to spend their liife writing GPL programs.

They can't do it with Gnome, because Gnome is GPL and only GPL, and stuff you develop using GPL licensed libraries has to be GPL. They can do it with QT, because the nice people at Trolltech will happily sell them a commercial license.

Or are you one of the people who think you should be able to take the Trolltech people's work and make money out of it, without giving any of the money back?

Nethack is an excelent turn-based game. It features lots of characters, potions, spells, weapons, aromour, shops, etc. The homepage is here and the Qt version (which i prefer) is here

--

First of all, don't give up. It is true that Microsoft has almost complete domination of Israel due to its complete Hebrew support in its OS, but a lot progress has been made in that area in the Unix world in recent months.

For those of you who didn't know, KDE's Konqueror web browser can display any Hebrew web page, including Microsoft IE's "logical Hebrew". In addition, the QT library on which KDE is based will have full support for displaying and writing RTL Unicode text in its next major release. Check out these two screenshots for an example of these capabilities that are currently in development:
http://trolls.troll.no/~lars/unicode1.png, and
http://trolls.troll.no/~lars/unicode2.png.
After having this version of QT released, a lot of our Hebrew problems will be solved.
For more information on Hebrew in KDE, check out http://www.kde.org/il/.

First of all, don't give up. It is true that Microsoft has almost complete domination of Israel due to its complete Hebrew support in its OS, but a lot progress has been made in that area in the Unix world in recent months.

For those of you who didn't know, KDE's Konqueror web browser can display any Hebrew web page, including Microsoft IE's "logical Hebrew". In addition, the QT library on which KDE is based will have full support for displaying and writing RTL Unicode text in its next major release. Check out these two screenshots for an example of these capabilities that are currently in development:
http://trolls.troll.no/~lars/unicode1.png, and
http://trolls.troll.no/~lars/unicode2.png.
After having this version of QT released, a lot of our Hebrew problems will be solved.
For more information on Hebrew in KDE, check out http://www.kde.org/il/.

How could you forget the 100s of other emulators for game systems like the Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Gameboy, Atari, MSX, and on and on... There are great open source emulators for linux that work great on fast computers. So, actually, with classic game emulation alone, Linux has over 10,000 games easy. For a good arcade and console game system emulation site, check Zophar's Domain and look under the "Emulators for Unix" sections on the right hand side menu.

I admit that added full DOS/Windows emulation would add another 10,000 or so games, but do you even have the time to play that many games?
Oh, and nethack is cool and all, especially with that graphical front-end (has a Final Fantasy 1 look). Qt Graphical Nethack is a way to easily get your friends to start playing. Now, the best Rouge-like game has to be ADOM. It has everything that NetHack doesn't: a real storyline, towns with NPCs, agriculture, etc...

• SSH
  
• Qt, so the remaining apprehension over KDE can be put to rest and the GNOME and KDE projects can share more code without worries over license conflicts
  
• Mainstream SCM, RAD and UML tools companies
  

• The GNU General Public License (GPL);

• The GNU Library or `Lesser' Public License (LGPL);

• The BSD license;

• The MIT license (sometimes called called the `X Consortium license');

• The Artistic license;

• The Mozilla Public License (MPL);

• The Qt Public License (QPL).

• The IBM Public License.

• The MITRE Collaborative Virtual Workspace License (CVW License).

• The Ricoh Source Code Public License.

• The Python license.

• The zlib/libpng license.

-tim

When modifications to the Software are released under this license, a non-exclusive royalty-free right is granted to the initial developer of the Software to distribute your modification in future versions of the Software provided such versions remain available under these terms in addition to any other license(s) of the initial developer. (emphasis mine)

KDE uses the (C++) Qt widget set from troll. KDE, therefore is mostly, if not entirely, C++ based.

KDevelop is still capable of creating C only projects, IIRC.

I have a general question, and then some personal observations.

I'll try to help.

First, isn't the religious reason for Gnome the fact that QT is not GPL, and KDE needs QT?

Yes. But most Gnome developers won't even discus that these days.

Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand the situation, but couldn't the effort that created Gnome have created a GPL work-alike to QT?

Yeah. That's what team KDE said. In fact there was an attempt to do just that in a project called "Harmony". As soon as Troll Tech announced that QT-2.0 would be under an OSS / Free Software license called QPL the developers on that project quit and went to work on KDE.

In fact, as I recall, the KDE developers could not even VIEW the QT source when KDE was originally written,

This is incorrect. They could view the QT source all they wanted but they couldn't distribute modifications.

Gnome is not bad, but I don't see what the performance penalty is buying me.

A desktop interface is very much a matter of preference. There are people out there who prefer FVWM2 for reasons other than performance. Try them all and use whatever you like. There is no need to worry about benefits that don't affect you.

The general response to this question is "Gnome is not slow for me." If this is true for you, perhaps you have some configuration hints you can share.

Get a faster machine. After you get a really fast box there really isn't any need to worry about the performance of the desktop.

The short version: Why should I run Gnome instead of KDE, assuming that I don't care about QT licensing quibbles?

Why not just use whatever works for you ? If Gnome doesn't like your machine or the way you configure it so just use KDE and stop fretting. It's not like the KDE desktop will stop you from using the Gnome apps or vise versa.

What do I gain for the (possibly only perceived) poor performance of Gnome.

At the very least Gnome has a far better FreeCell program. Better even than the Windows 9x version.

(To disclaim again, I am posting these questions in good faith.)

That won't stop them from moderating us both into oblivion. :)

Likewise, unless you're Microsoft, you can't force anyone to use a particular widget set, UI, anything.

It's not clear you can even do that if you're Microsoft; one of the applications running on the NT partition of my home machine uses GTK+. (No, it's not the Gimp, it's Ethereal.)

There's also Qt for Win32 as well.

I just realized something. While reading some troll posts here right now.

QT is comming from TROLL TECH

That gotta be a conspiracy. I bet they are directly responsible for 90% of the trolling here on slashdot.

I'm wondering if LinuxOne has paid the licensing fee for use of QT in a proprietary product. The QPL prohibits proprietary software, so they can't develop it under that.

What is the developer version license again? Is it a whopping $1,550 per developer or something like that? I'd be interested to find out if someone has informed the folks at troll tech. They are already selling this product on their web site.

CmdrChalupa (Who knows not how to change his sig =)

I haven't figured out how to do similar dragging and dropping on the desktop or between applications with KDE or Gnome. I'm pretty sure it's there,

GTK+ 1.2[.x] (the toolkit for Gnome - as well as for many non-GNOME applications) has support for drag-and-drop, using both the Xdnd protocol and the Motif DnD protocol. Qt 2.0 (the toolkit for the under-development KDE 2.0) also supports drag-and-drop using Xdnd (but not, as far as I know, the Motif DnD protocol); I think Qt 1.x supported DnD on UNIX/X11, but not using Xdnd (unless one of the later 1.x's added support for it, which it might have).

Here's Troll Tech's documentation on DnD with Qt (probably for 2.0). There may be additional KDE APIs atop that; try plowing through the KDE developer's site.

Here's the GTK+ reference documentation section on DnD APIs; again, there may be additional GNOME APIs atop it - if you plow through the GNOME developer's site, you may find something.

I'm pretty sure it's there, but it doesn't seem as integrated as it did on Irix.

"Doesn't seem as integrated" in what sense? Presumably not in the API sense, as you haven't yet looked at the API; maybe fewer KDE and/or GNOME applications support DnD, but I'm not going to assume that's the case.

I do note that IBM has VisualAge COBOL, but where are the Qt bindings?

... And when will you be putting fixed-record support into ext2?

Which one of the COBOL environments provides a metaobject protocol? (Just as CLOS - Common Lisp Object System has, as does C++ as does Guile with GOOPS

Hmm? Hmm? Inquiring minds want to know...

Witb all the ipo money they have, Red Hat is going to buy up a couple more companies before they're done; normally, companies use ipo money to invest in fab plants or advertising, and neither is particularly relevant to linux at the moment, so they have to pour the money somewhere, and there's only so much money that can be burned internally. Corel, however, isn't the best choice, for reasons stated elsewhere.

As for buying out Troll Tech and QT, Red Hat had better want to maintain QT under its current liscense or under a more open liscense, because of that certain clause that allows the KDE Free QT Foundation to release QT under a BSD liscense given the correct conditions.

If you believe that jetson123 might be serious, please look at the Qt reference customer list.

Ironically, he is the troll here, not Troll Tech.

As for the license, this is not a question of "opinion" or "discussion" or "FUD"; just read the QPL yourself and understand it. You can find it at http://www.troll.no/qpl/.

There are many subtle differences between the QPL license and the GNOME/Gtk license, but there is also a big, fundamental difference: GNOME/Gtk is licensed under LGPL, while QPL is licensed under something resembling GPL. RMS and FSF got a lot of heat for GPL and the problems it caused, and LGPL was invented for that reason. I couldn't use Qt even if it came with a straight GPL license. Whether RMS calls QPL "open source" or not makes no difference to me; what matters is what the license itself requires.

Some other key items to notice with QPL are:

• The distinction between "free" and "professional" edition exists, as it always did.
• The intent behind QPL is stated as allowing the development of non-commercial software with it; for anything commercial, you have to pay. ("The QPL prohibits the development of proprietary software.")
• If you read the "Free Qt Foundation" document carefully, you will see that the foundation can only grant a BSD-style license on Qt by unanimous vote of its members; what kind of safety is that?

I suggest that if you are serious about QPL/Qt and have actually read the licenses, you contribute some facts and analysis instead of anonymously complaining of "FUD". I have no personal investment in either GNOME or KDE; I'm just looking at it as a CS researcher who need to build GUIs occasionally, and as such I look carefully at the licenses of the software I use. And I still think the QPL doesn't cut it, for all the reasons I mention above.

As for the license, this is not a question of "opinion" or "discussion" or "FUD"; just read the QPL yourself and understand it. You can find it at http://www.troll.no/qpl/.

There are many subtle differences between the QPL license and the GNOME/Gtk license, but there is also a big, fundamental difference: GNOME/Gtk is licensed under LGPL, while QPL is licensed under something resembling GPL. RMS and FSF got a lot of heat for GPL and the problems it caused, and LGPL was invented for that reason. I couldn't use Qt even if it came with a straight GPL license. Whether RMS calls QPL "open source" or not makes no difference to me; what matters is what the license itself requires.

Some other key items to notice with QPL are:

• The distinction between "free" and "professional" edition exists, as it always did.
• The intent behind QPL is stated as allowing the development of non-commercial software with it; for anything commercial, you have to pay. ("The QPL prohibits the development of proprietary software.")
• If you read the "Free Qt Foundation" document carefully, you will see that the foundation can only grant a BSD-style license on Qt by unanimous vote of its members; what kind of safety is that?

I suggest that if you are serious about QPL/Qt and have actually read the licenses, you contribute some facts and analysis instead of anonymously complaining of "FUD". I have no personal investment in either GNOME or KDE; I'm just looking at it as a CS researcher who need to build GUIs occasionally, and as such I look carefully at the licenses of the software I use. And I still think the QPL doesn't cut it, for all the reasons I mention above.

That appears to be the Qt Way of handling printing.

It is interesting to contrast with other methods that have been used historically and recently:

• NeXtStep, and now GNUstep, use Display Postscript
• Adobe has restricted future access to commercial DPS, and hence Apple OS-X plans to use PDF as a display substrate to replace DPS.
• The GNOME Project has created an imaging model that seems to parallel Display Postscript that, as the GNOME Canvas, is also displayable.
• Less well-known is libprint

It is not clear whether or not KDE is using the QtPainter facility, or whether there is need for something like GNOME Canvas...

The QPL explicitly reserves for the "initial developer" the right to use my contributions under any licenses they care to - it doesn't even try to guarantee that my contributions can only be used in support of Free Software. Simply put, the QPL and the GPL serve opposing goals, so of course they aren't compatible.

The real problem is that many Qt-using applications are licensed under the GPL and that the GPL and QPL interact badly. The KDE developers are migrating from the GPL to the Artistic license, which will end this problem.

The real problem is that many Qt-using applications are licensed under the GPL and that the GPL and QPL interact badly. The KDE developers are migrating from the GPL to the Artistic license, which will end this problem.