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Can Qt and KDE Applications be Ported to Win32
gatzke asks: "Can Qt and KDE applications be ported to Win32? I have had success using Cygwin32 to make and use some applications for NT (LyX). If I remember correctly, Qt originally prohibitted use on Win32 without paying big bucks. Now that Qt is GPL and KDE is "legal", can the Kapplications be ported over for those stuck in legacy environments? I tried out Koffice and was pretty impressed. If they add a couple more features, and I can switch from Powerpoint."
Excuse me for one second.
l
/me takes a deep breath and counts to ten saying "the FSF are not evil people, they are not spreading lies about KDE and QT on purpose".
Okay, I feel better know. To answer your question yes you are legally entitled to use Cygwin to port KDE Applications and QT to Windows.
If you want to get picky about it then: GPL compatible KDE applications can be ported since QT and all the KDE libraries are under GPL compatible licenses (GPL, LGPL, MIT, or new BSD)
GPL incompatible KDE applications (eg artistic licensed ones) can be ported since QT is QPLed (sorry I'm not going to explain that point fully, it's just to painful to go there)
Actually as far as QT goes this is covered in the QT Free Edition faq on the TT website:
http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faq/free.htm
> > I want to use Qt to develop free software on
> > Windows.
>
> Qt/Windows is only available as
> Professional/Enterprise Edition, not as Free
> Edition. Using an X client library for Windows
> and a Windows X server, it is possible to use
> the X11 version of Qt on Windows.
Remember that there are limitations on distribution of such applications. You are allowed to distribute such applications if they are free software.
-AC
Qt is available for Windows, so ports should theoretically be little harder than a recompile (unless there's Unix-specific code in there; that will have to be rewritten, but the Qt code should not).
However, Qt is a very different beast on Windows. In particular, the "Qt Free Edition" does not exist there; you have to pay licensing fees as if your app were commercial on Unix. That could complicate things considerably.
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Damn! I've misunderstood licensing again. This takes more patience than learning to program :(
I thought if Qt was finally GPL-compatible and/or GPL'd directly, one could take the code and do nearly anything, including building Windows version.
If this isn't true, I'm disappointed, because any good Free UI toolkit has got to be easily portable to Windows if we're ever going to Borg the Windows shareware people. A good free Delphi/VB like environment that's 1-CLick To Compile (patent pending) for both Linux and Windows/Mac would do LOTS to loosen Microsoft's stranglehold on development.
Sure, GTK *compiles* on Windows... if you own Visual C++ and are adept and workarounds and hacking makefiles. GTK is not a viable development environment on Windows.
wxWindows looks GREAT... but it hasn't caught on and no environment uses it by default (if Python endorsed it as a replacement for dead-ugly Tkinter that would be great).
I might as well stick to MFC on Windows, and Tk on Linux. Not an ideal compromise...
I was really just wondering if the Qt free version for Unix could be compiled using the Cygwin tools. If so, you could run Qt based apps in Windows as long as you use an X server on the windows box.
Here's your shareware X11 server. However, there is no free X server on Win32...
Will I retire or break 10K?
or you can use the one that already works...
According to the Cygwin/XFree86 FAQ, XFree86 4 "may not work at all on Windows 9x/Me due to 16-bit code in the win 9x GDI. ... If you are using Windows 95 or 98, break out your debugger and start working around the 16-bit code in GDI32.dll and kernel32.dll." Upgrading all users to NT is not an option; they might as well install Debian anyway.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Basically QT is an interface to the windowing system and as such highly platform dependent so "porting" the free linux version would basically involve writing the whole thing from scratch.. not an option..
All of the questions presented in this are available on trolltechs website in faq. Sometimes I wonder if people submitting questions even try to do their own research.. I mean how hard is it to point your web browser from slashdot to say Google or www.trolltech.com .
So the answer is yes and no. KDE is not just applications. There is kde base, kde libs, kde support, which all have to be ported over to windows. This would include the kde window manager code which may or may not work under cygwin. From my understanding and use of cygwin I had problems just getting X to work withough crashing my machine.
Further more the problem is that the way windows accesses devices and the way linux access devices is different. This means that you would have to modify significant portions of some of these libraries to port them over. In particular anything that deals with opening /dev/midi, or /dev/audio. I guess what I am saying is that porting over kde multimedia would probably be a chore. Once you have kdelibs, kde base and kde support ported over, assuimng that the application that you are porting over does not make any system calls you may be okay. I.E. kqps and kinfo would not work as they make use of Linux specific things.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!