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Can Qt and KDE Applications be Ported to Win32

Posted by Cliff on from the going-in-the-opposite-direction dept.

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."

1 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. aside from the license issue... by josepha48 · · Score: 4
    If you ignore the license issues for a minute, I think maybe the real quesion is weather the code will port over to windows. Other have already pointed out the licens issues.

    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.

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