[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] RFC: Qtopia Nokia N770 (maemo) porting layer

[From: Shawn Gordon]

I've been watching this thread with interest, and I have some feedback for you.

Qtopia is about a 3mb footprint, it is pretty small, has its own 
framebuffer and doesn't rely on X, this is for Qt2x.  Qt3 was never 
made in to an embedded version because of its size.  I'm told that 
Qt4x was modularized better so it could be used for embedded again, I 
don't think anyone is doing it yet.

OPIE is a problem from a licensing and compatibility point of 
view.  OPIE is a fork of the GPL version of Qtopia and as time has 
gone on it has become less compatible.  The other issue is the 
license, you cannot bundle a non-GPL app with OPIE and it is 
technically a GPL violation to use a non-GPL app with it because the 
application is now using the GPL versions of the libraries.  The 
other problem for a commercial software company is that you can't 
rely on the fact that it is going to be available unless of course 
you have found some way to static link everything together, it would 
be like running a Qt app under GNOME basically.

I have a huge investment in Qtopia development, nothing I'd like 
better than to be able to just run them on the device without having 
to rewrite the UI, but short of Nokia changing their mind and 
licensing Qtopia, any effort is just going to remain in the realm of 
the hobbyist IMO.

At 11:11 AM 11/8/2005, you wrote:
>2005/11/8, Clemens Eisserer <linuxhippy at gmail.com>:
> > > ...which makes these sound a bit funky. If you use *anything*
> > > GUI-related that is already implemented, you'll drag Gtk+ in. Which
> > > will mean that you need to have both Qt and Gtk+ libraries in memory
> > > at the same time, which I think is not too hot on the current
> > > hardware.
> >
> > >From this point of view I think GTK2 was the completly wrong choice as
> > Maemo's GUI toolkit. Its slow (mameo contains even a hacked version
> > which tries to speed it up a bit) and heavyweight (megs of code
> > splitted in many different shared-libs), but it was choosen for
> > compatibility as the whole Xserver based approach. (fox-toolkit  or
> > fltk are much more efficient)
>
>If Maemo would get a hacker every time somebody said that...
>
>I assume Qt has not got "megs of code" then?
>The Qt site boasts that:
>
>"The Qt Class Library  is a growing library of over 400 C++ classes [..]"
>
>That doesn't sound lightweight to me ;)
>
>Gtk+ is, in my opinion, fast enough for the 770, the bulk of the
>performance issues come from the limited memory from which the (AFAIK
>non-gtk) system services occupy a fair share and from the fact that
>there is virtually no acceleration for the graphics.
>
> > I think with this decision in mind a port of QT would not be that bad
> > either since it would allow running apps on your Maemo powered device
> > which would not be able to run otherwise or would not look that good.
>
>I'm all for a Qt version, diversity is good.
>
>It's having both of them in memory at the same time that is bad. Which
>also means that running programs for both at the same time would be
>bad too.
>
>And as said, most of stuff already done is in Gtk+, so you'd
>effectively have to write the GUI bits from scratch. But hey, in case
>you haven't noticed, Maemo is free software ;)
>
>--
>Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi
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Regards,

Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany.com
www.mindawn.com
949-713-3276