Ubuntu Mobile Looks At Qt As GNOME Alternative

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.'"

Comments

Full 'nix for arm?

[serviscope_minor]

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. Also, the developers need to be reminded that screens are 640x480 on small devices, not 800x600. It would start if they got out of the habit of using excessively lavish button bars with enourmous, heavily padded buttons.

Anyway, it would be nice to see a proper "full" linux distribution. I'm not much of a fan of the special PDA ones since they're cut down. Then again, I'm not much of a fan of ubuntu either, but I appreciate that (say) Arch isn't to everyone's taste.

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[Mprx]

Padding makes clicking on the buttons faster, as explained by Fitts's law. I don't want my usability compromised because some people are using impractically small screens.

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[chromatic]

Keyboarding may be faster occasionally, but you'll be surprised how often mousing wins.

I use Vim all day, almost every day. Using a mouse and a word processor is very much not faster for me.

Yah for the LGPL

[QuantumG]

For too many years the GPL has been killing adoption of Qt. That's a fact. Maybe it shouldn't have. Maybe people should be willing to be dictated to on what license they can use for their product because they dare to use the Qt framework. Maybe that's your opinion.

Of course, now that so many people are piling on-board to use Qt thanks to the license change, I wonder how many of them have actually bothered to read the LGPL. My favourite part is section 4.

You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications,

Yeah, didn't see that did ya? Almost every boiler plate EULA includes a clause prohibiting reverse engineering and I wonder how many have not been updated to comply with the LGPL (thankfully a lot of us can just ignore these restrictions as the government in our part of the world recognizes reverse engineering as a right that cannot be contracted out of).

I'll be looking for violations.. just for shits and giggles.

Re:Whiney complaints (send to /dev/null)

[tftp]

WTF? What is that all about to someone who just wants to run an application that uses Qt?

If you want only to run a Qt-based app then you do not need to do anything except to install the application. It should install the Qt runtime libraries for you.

Why the hell am I even looking at this when I just want to run an application?

A good question indeed :-)

If you want Qt widely used you need to make it easy to get and install.

If you are a developer then installation of Qt is the least of your worries. If you are an end user then, as I said, you should not install Qt at all.

Re:Whiney complaints (send to /dev/null)

[Draek]

I know my comment will be burried for saying this, but this kind of crap is what we all know is wrong with open source software. The front end delivery is done by geeks and bean counters who don't actually use the products as end users.

You may notice the fact that QT was originally developed by a commercial company, Trolltech. You may also notice the fact that since, until lately, they sold commercial licenses for the same software they licensed as GPL, practically all contributions to the 'main' branch of QT were done by Trolltech (and now Nokia) employees. Therefore, if anything, this proves the failings of cathedral-style development, of which closed-source is the biggest exponent.

Ohh and also, being a person unwilling to use pre-compiled packages to be able to use a library you do *not* plan to use as a developer puts you amongst the minority of a minority of a minority of users, therefore do not be surprised if Trolltech/Nokia doesn't care about you at all.

Qt is *NOT* Gnome alternative itself

[hubert.lepicki]

OK, Qt isn't even close to Gnome in terms of being a desktop environment. In fact, it isn't a desktop environment at all - so it can't be alternative to Gnome. It can be alternative to GTK, which is underlying library for Gnome. What I guess is the case - Ubuntu might look for KDE as an alternative to Gnome desktop, or create something new based on QT that'll fit more on small screens.