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

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[Mprx]

If you really wanted to do things fast you'd use the mouse (preferably with gestures or pie menus).
http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html :

We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Try timing yourself on some web browsing/text editing/file managing tasks. Keyboarding may be faster occasionally, but you'll be surprised how often mousing wins.

GTK2.x theming to the rescue

[bornagainpenguin]

Martin Ankerl has a potential solution for you then, he made a HOWTO and has released a compact version of Human and Clearlooks which really make a difference! I even use them when I'm on my desktop these days to cut down on screen bloat. Find the HOWTO and linsk to the themes here: http://martin.ankerl.com/2008/10/10/how-to-make-a-compact-gnome-theme/

--bornagainpenguin

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[alexborges]

It depends SO much in what people are trying to accomplish that the discussion is NOT worth it.

I mean, if im a designer, the mouse is better. If im a programmer, the keyboard shortcuts will be the best way to not loose the rythm (yeah, there is rythm in this bussiness).

If Im a bussiness exec, I dont know why I have a computer.

Re:Yah for the LGPL

[QuantumG]

No. You fail. To understand what the LGPL means you need to actually read the LGPL. I know it's scary, but there ya go. The provisions actually say that you have to permit reverse engineering of the application, and take no action to permit said reverse engineering, so that one can debug changes to the LGPL library. The purpose of these provisions is to allow someone to fix problems in the LGPL library and have your application work with those changes.