Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: I really appreciate work of Trolltech ... Nokia toward making pure qtopia available for Freerunner. Probably the suite of QT apps available for qtopia would be sufficient for a large portion of FR owners, but would not satisfy all of them. But that again simply comes to the heterogeneity of the FR community. I can only hope that qtopia will be kept constantly updated and enhanced for a long period of time, and that some new gadget from Nokia will not shift the focus away from FR ;-) Amen -- Drucken Sie diese Mail bitte nur auf Recyclingpapier aus. Please print this mail only on recycled paper. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:11:39 -0400 Yaroslav Halchenko [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: recently. BUT to get such responsive UI sacrifices had been made, thus there is no X (I do not even want to touch GPL vs BSD/... issue here). actually to be more on topic - sacrificing x11 does not make a ui more responsive. you have a bad-responding ui in x11 if you simply design its nuts and bolts operations in such a way to trigger the slowest paths for x11. if you know your x11, you can make a perfectly responsive ui. you'd never know x11 was even there. the problem is that there is a lot of mis-use of it, and i need to defend x11 here as it is most certainly not the culprit. :) it's merely the messenger (eg if you upload/download pixmaps all the time... guess what - you are uploading and downloading data to/from video ram all the time, and this comes with the attendant consequences brought forth by the hardware). -- Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Timo Jyrinki wrote: 2008/7/23 Shawn Rutledge [EMAIL PROTECTED]: But what does closed mean? It's been getting more and more open for years now. Finally even QTopia is GPL... I think that's the last piece isn't it? Is it because it already emerged fully-formed, and was not depending on community help for its very existence, that you think it's more closed? Actually, that's true. A code drop is not equal to successful open source project. Not mentioning qtopia exactly, but there are several examples of open source which are even under OSI-approved license that are nothing more than a source tarball - no community, no control outside one entity etc. It still is open source, even if the development is not so open. A lot of open source communities are not 'anyone has write access to the source repository'. You have to prove yourself first. I think most projects are like that. Heck I think openmoko wasn't developed in the open in the beginning. It cannot be so hard to understand that not everyone wants to port everything into one toolkit. It doesn't matter which toolkit that is. Phones are becoming computers and do not need any less flexibility on what can be done with them. How does sticking to one toolkit mean less flexibility? You can write the same type of app in any language, its just a matter of how well your toolkit works for you. -- Lorn 'ljp' Potter Software Engineer, Systems Group, Trolltech, a Nokia company ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Lorn Potter wrote, On 23/07/08 09:23: Timo Jyrinki wrote: [snip] It cannot be so hard to understand that not everyone wants to port everything into one toolkit. It doesn't matter which toolkit that is. Phones are becoming computers and do not need any less flexibility on what can be done with them. How does sticking to one toolkit mean less flexibility? You can write the same type of app in any language, its just a matter of how well your toolkit works for you. You are effectively advocating a single silo approach to development. i.e. Qtopia is the one-true development environment and everything else is subordinate to it. However, let's say you have some GTK developers who want to port their app to the OpenMoko. You're saying they should learn a completely new toolkit. The alternative view is to create a development platform that allows Qtopia, GTK, etc. and then anyone could build apps for it and users then get the choice of what apps they use. You're argument about the users getting a unified experience is a good one, but then the users can choose: even on the 'anything goes' platform, they could choose to just run the Qtopia applications - their freedom hasn't been limited in any way, and their options in the future are increased. Sometimes more diversity is a good thing. -- Alex. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Shawn Rutledge wrote: On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Tilman Baumann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I might do qtopia more wrong than is fair. But they modelling just a regular smart phone like you can get from most vendors. With a very closed (but opensource) framework wich you can develop for. You can not port your garden variety x11 app to qtopia. Which you can (almost) do with the other frameworks. But what does closed mean? Boundaries, limitations. It's been getting more and more open for years now. Finally even QTopia is GPL... I think that's the last piece isn't it? I'm not talking about the license. Qtopia is propper opensource. (as i pointed out) Maybe not everyone's most famous flavour, but i don't care for that. Is it because it already emerged fully-formed, and was not depending on community help for its very existence, that you think it's more closed? Closed means in this case. Most decisions already made, forced to use a certain set of languages, toolkits, technologies... And i don't say that is bad. Qtopia is a very nice complete and well designed and holistic bottom up system. A complete package. Take it, use it, be happy. But i prefer to go the top down approach because i think it will lead (at least for me) to better and funnier innovations and changes. Opensource thrives on diversification. What does garden variety mean? I don't think there's any such thing as a garden variety X11 app unless you are using xlib itself, which very few people bother with. Or maybe you are thinking about older toolkits like Motif and Athena Widgets? xlib is the most common denominator of all x11 apps. Sure, nobody uses it directly. But as easy as you can port a xlib based app could you port a xlib based toolkit. If you are not happy with what we already have on toolist, port it. (I know at least qt, gtk and efl to be available on openmoko already) With QT, apps tend to be smaller because the toolkit is so complete, that you have less code to write. You pay a cost in having a larger library to load, but then all the apps benefit from it. So having a simpler, more spartan toolkit can cut both ways. I'm not saying qt is bad. And you are (willingly) mixing up qt as a api and qt-embedded/qtopia as a framework. But whatever, it's just Gnome/KDE all over again, I shouldn't expect a logical argument I guess. Depends on what you meant. Gnome or KDE is a bullshit discussion. The answer is just BOTH. And of course the fact that it does not use x11, i expected you to know that. ;-) But the plan is that it will, right? No and yes. The original poster referred to the non x11 version. And that is where the performance boost comes from. And then we will see, which is really faster. Does not matter, i can't see a clear winner there. As soon as you throw away the non-x11 bonus for Qt it will come down to marginal differences. It would be an option in either case to do some optimization: kdrive could accelerate some graphics operations, and QTopia-on-framebuffer could do the same. All else being equal, the one with fewer layers ought to be faster. But kdrive is likely to get more community attention, so maybe we will realistically see some hardware acceleration eventually. Any optimisation on x11 would benefit all toolkits the same. It really depends, many people like the simple qtopia stack. But i did not buy my Neo to have a phone that does essentially what any better Motorola or Nokia could do too. Anyone can write new QT apps. It's even fun, and fairly rapid development compared to typical C/C++. Agree, but i o also want to port code. It would look great on a motorla razr (or however these things are called today) But i did not find it to fit very well on the extremely large screen resolution and touchpad only input. The RAZR used a completely proprietary OS and toolkit. The high-end touchscreen phones are exactly the ones that are mostly running QT or Symbian, in the commercial world. Some motorolas are in fact using linux and if i'm not mistaken qtopia. But not as a open system. But i was not comparing technologies but user experiences. -- Drucken Sie diese Mail bitte nur auf Recyclingpapier aus. Please print this mail only on recycled paper. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
On Wednesday 23 July 2008 01:38:35 Lorn Potter wrote: i never mentioned commercial apps nor money. Yes you did. pay for a license' implies both money and you needing a commercial license, which implies you intend on producing closed source applications. maybe he just wants commercial support? So that someone looks at the patches he sends? love z. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Holger Freyther wrote: On Wednesday 23 July 2008 01:38:35 Lorn Potter wrote: i never mentioned commercial apps nor money. Yes you did. pay for a license' implies both money and you needing a commercial license, which implies you intend on producing closed source applications. maybe he just wants commercial support? So that someone looks at the patches he sends? Neuros uses the GPL license and has a support package. and we do look at patches you send. -- Lorn 'ljp' Potter Software Engineer, Systems Group, Trolltech, a Nokia company ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote: On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:42:19 +1000 Lorn Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: Holger Freyther wrote: On Wednesday 23 July 2008 01:38:35 Lorn Potter wrote: i never mentioned commercial apps nor money. Yes you did. pay for a license' implies both money and you needing a commercial license, which implies you intend on producing closed source applications. maybe he just wants commercial support? So that someone looks at the patches he sends? Neuros uses the GPL license and has a support package. and we do look at patches you send. again - i said nothing of a closed or commercial app and charging for it - is said that i would HAVE to pay a license fee to get qt under a license OTHER than GPL so *I* can release my software under a non-GPL infested license (eg MIT-X11, BSD, etc. etc.). my point being that not all type of open are the same - and people prefer different levels of freedom and openness. i prefer to give my users more freedom of choice than you give yours. thuds my choice would always be to not use qt as it would restrict my freedoms to only be the kind of freedom you want, and in turn restrict my users too. By releasing something that allows closed source linking, you are restricting your users rights to recompile all the software. How is that giving your users more rights? If you don't like free software, why the heck are you developing for a 'free your phone' phone? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:21:21 +1000 Lorn Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote: On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:42:19 +1000 Lorn Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: Holger Freyther wrote: On Wednesday 23 July 2008 01:38:35 Lorn Potter wrote: i never mentioned commercial apps nor money. Yes you did. pay for a license' implies both money and you needing a commercial license, which implies you intend on producing closed source applications. maybe he just wants commercial support? So that someone looks at the patches he sends? Neuros uses the GPL license and has a support package. and we do look at patches you send. again - i said nothing of a closed or commercial app and charging for it - is said that i would HAVE to pay a license fee to get qt under a license OTHER than GPL so *I* can release my software under a non-GPL infested license (eg MIT-X11, BSD, etc. etc.). my point being that not all type of open are the same - and people prefer different levels of freedom and openness. i prefer to give my users more freedom of choice than you give yours. thuds my choice would always be to not use qt as it would restrict my freedoms to only be the kind of freedom you want, and in turn restrict my users too. By releasing something that allows closed source linking, you are restricting your users rights to recompile all the software. How is that giving your users more rights? If you don't like free software, why the heck are you as i said - YOU subscribe to one kind of freedom - i subscribe to another. mine allows a developer to create a closed application or library if they want to - that gives them freedom. THIS app and THIS library now cannot be considered open. but i do not begrudge them the freedom to do so. i very much align myself with Voltaire - not RMS. I disagree with what you have to say but will fight to the death to protect your right to say it. or in software terms: I disagree with you making your software that uses mine closed source, but I will fight to the death to protect your right to do so. I believe in true freedom - and true freedom does NOT impose someone elses ideas of freedom on others. That is what I believe. So in the case of a closed app or lib built on top - well then, it is still the choice of a user to not use that app or library, but i sure am not going to force a particular brand of open (GPL in this case) down the throats of people. LGPL is definitely acceptable. as is BSD, MIT-X11 as the limitations of the license do not virally spread beyond the boundaries of the actual piece of software released and licensed under it. :) -- Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Hello, On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 12:21 AM, Lorn Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: By releasing something that allows closed source linking, you are restricting your users rights to recompile all the software. How is that giving your users more rights? If you don't like free software, why the heck are you developing for a 'free your phone' phone? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html People, this discussion has turned _very_ off topic now. Could you all please take further discussion on this subject in a place where it is more on topic? Thank you. -- Regards, Torfinn Ingolfsen ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 00:42, Torfinn Ingolfsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: People, this discussion has turned _very_ off topic now. Could you all please take further discussion on this subject in a place where it is more on topic? Thank you. Well not so off topic since we are at a point where choices are made about what direction development on openmoko will take... (even if maybe there will be several directions in parallel) (I mean not only for the OS and base applis, but also for applications one would want to develop) It is not so bad that it is clear for everyone what the strengths and specifics of each choices are. And even if it is not a new problematic, not everyone is fully aware of it. And when comes the time to decide to investigate/develop on one architecture, it is good to fully understand what they imply. Better than only deciding on, say, the look of existing applications. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
just my few cents... please be gentle if I reveal some ignorance in any part of my expressions such a topic could go forever and include thousands of replies because it debates some basic decisions which had been made and which have sufficient amount of pros and cons for the each side of the debate. Such segmentation of the 'human mass' could be partially attributed to the heterogeneity of opensource community (among which as you see there might co-exist different senses of freedom --- no pun intended, thus don't continue on this topic). It would better be characterized with a single neutral-tone summary on wiki listing the aspects of different distributions, their current abilities, range of available applications, and future possible improvements. in my summary: QT with qtopia offers to a generic public a convenient, somewhat well-established, somewhat featurefull, consistently looking, opensource way to develop the applications for the phones. I really appreciated and liked their qtopia distro for FR when I tried it recently. BUT to get such responsive UI sacrifices had been made, thus there is no X (I do not even want to touch GPL vs BSD/... issue here). Such a choice has strong advantages (qtopia on FR looks and seems to be working quite well), but it also imposes limitations on what part of existing applications base can be easily ported or supported to co-exist with native QT apps on such a box... actually it just limits apps to QT apps. and that is imho the end of discussion -- at this moment it is just the situation which has to be accepted. But once again, many people like/develop apps which are not based on QT due to various reasons (again... lets omit license issues), thus their choice would be a generic X-based distribution such as 2007.2 and ASU. Now they would lack (hopefully for not too long) consistent and stable appearance/performance/API, but that is once again the choice which had been made. I really appreciate work of Trolltech ... Nokia toward making pure qtopia available for Freerunner. Probably the suite of QT apps available for qtopia would be sufficient for a large portion of FR owners, but would not satisfy all of them. But that again simply comes to the heterogeneity of the FR community. I can only hope that qtopia will be kept constantly updated and enhanced for a long period of time, and that some new gadget from Nokia will not shift the focus away from FR ;-) On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Cédric Berger wrote: On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 00:42, Torfinn Ingolfsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: People, this discussion has turned _very_ off topic now. Could you all please take further discussion on this subject in a place where it is more on topic? Thank you. Well not so off topic since we are at a point where choices are made about what direction development on openmoko will take... (even if maybe there will be several directions in parallel) (I mean not only for the OS and base applis, but also for applications one would want to develop) -- Yaroslav Halchenko Research Assistant, Psychology Department, Rutgers-Newark Student Ph.D. @ CS Dept. NJIT Office: (973) 353-5440x263 | FWD: 82823 | Fax: (973) 353-1171 101 Warren Str, Smith Hall, Rm 4-105, Newark NJ 07102 WWW: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Am 22.07.2008 um 02:38 schrieb Lorn Potter: Tilman Baumann wrote: Am 21.07.2008 um 20:08 schrieb Lorn Potter: Tilman Baumann wrote: Yorick Moko wrote: This might be a stupid question, but it isn't the first and will not be the last stupid one I ask :). I have glimpsed at the 2007.2, ASU and qtopia image (the latest builds) and a very noticable difference is the speed. Will this improve in the ASU and the 2007.2 or should I not get my hopes on? Qtopia just responds and seems to load everything faster. Qtopia has a more integrated aproach. They load plugins for different features. (AFAIK) And the other systems launch new programs for each task. Sometimes even based on different frameworks. (e,gtk,qt) There are ideas how to speed them up. Like pre-loading or integrating the basic phone apps into one binary. If you want speed now, take qtopia. What you get is a phone. The other systems go a few steps further... how so? Well, a almost desktop compliant x11 system with a wide variety of frameworks, libs and programming languages. It will be hard to achieve a consistent look and feel across all these toolkits. Not to mention inter process communication. Well, yes. Not everything that is possible actually makes sense. But it _can_ be done. Openmoko is by design more something like a mobile computing platform wich has GSM too. I might do qtopia more wrong than is fair. But they modelling just a regular smart phone like you can get from most vendors. With a very closed (but opensource) framework wich you can develop for. You can not port your garden variety x11 app to qtopia. Which you can (almost) do with the other frameworks. Any Qt app can be 'ported' easily. Just as with gtk, or efl, or pick- your-toolkit for any library that is on the device. So yes, you _can_ port your garden variety app to Qtopia. It just needs to be written with one common toolkit - Qt. Good point actually. And of course the fact that it does not use x11, i expected you to know that. ;-) It really depends, many people like the simple qtopia stack. But i did not buy my Neo to have a phone that does essentially what any better Motorola or Nokia could do too. Qtopia is not simple. The ui is (or should be), as that is needed on these devices that are screen real estate challenged. It would look great on a motorla razr (or however these things are called today) But i did not find it to fit very well on the extremely large screen resolution and touchpad only input. What do the other 'stacks' available for neo do any better? Currently i like the gtk stack (2007.2) best. Btw. I don't say qtopia is bad. I just don't like it very much. (tough it works really well) And Sharp Zaurus is proof that really nice qtopia based systems are doable. And not using x11 is probably a very sane step, if you can live without the portability factor. (That's porting other apps) I just don't like how qtopia looks and feels on openmokos phones. It's just too much as i am used from regular phones. And it's dataaccess layer is the qtopia api (like accessing contacts). I would like this api probably very much if i would code something in qt for qtopia. And i still have a project laying around here where qtopia phoene would fit very well. Maybe i will some day use it. But i want the extreme freedom for my phone not just opensource. And i wand something outrageous and maybe stupidly new and exiting. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Tilman Baumann wrote: And not using x11 is probably a very sane step, if you can live without the portability factor. (That's porting other apps) There is no portability factor. Only which toolkit is available. As one of our engineers here said on our internal discussion (and goes back to rasters comment): One of the neat advantages of Qtopia on Qt for Embedded Linux is that there is little penalty in converting back and forth between a QImage and QPixmap so we have used this extensively which makes quite a few things much easier and more possible than if things are based on X11 where these conversions are expensive and you then need to put a bit more thought in to it. -- Lorn 'ljp' Potter Software Engineer, Systems Group, Trolltech, a Nokia company ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Lorn Potter wrote: Tilman Baumann wrote: And not using x11 is probably a very sane step, if you can live without the portability factor. (That's porting other apps) There is no portability factor. Only which toolkit is available. You mean porting a toolkit on the basic QT canvas objects? Nice idea actually, that would make things really easy. -- Drucken Sie diese Mail bitte nur auf Recyclingpapier aus. Please print this mail only on recycled paper. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:10:27 +1000 Lorn Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: Tilman Baumann wrote: And not using x11 is probably a very sane step, if you can live without the portability factor. (That's porting other apps) There is no portability factor. Only which toolkit is available. As one of our engineers here said on our internal discussion (and goes back to rasters comment): One of the neat advantages of Qtopia on Qt for Embedded Linux is that there is little penalty in converting back and forth between a QImage and QPixmap so we have used this extensively which makes quite a few things much easier and more possible than if things are based on X11 where these conversions are expensive and you then need to put a bit more thought in to it. yup. for qws your conversions are cheap/almost free, but in x11 - not so. it probably is a matter of working with the x11 port of qtopia or changing the assumption that such conversions are cheap/free (eg never even using pixmaps - do everything software-rendered in client-space virtual framebuffers, as this is exactly what happens with qtopia on qws with a dumb fb anyway). this will never allow seamless acceleration and gfx-chip side functions doing as much work as they can, but will probably function about as well as qtopia with qws natively on a freerunner. so indeed - you are right. you made an ASSUMPTION of qws and these things being cheap conversions - though that may not be the case for some accelerated back ends for qws... but anyway - it can be improved.many options as to how to do it. x11 itself is not really a performance bottlneck - it is just the way you use it that makes the difference between it being a blocker for performance and a it doesnt matter. :) -- Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:38:35 +1000 Lorn Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: Well, a almost desktop compliant x11 system with a wide variety of frameworks, libs and programming languages. It will be hard to achieve a consistent look and feel across all these toolkits. Not to mention inter process communication. dbus. common look and feel - as long as there is choice and variety, this won't happen. wouldn't we love it if everyone drove a blue ford falcon.it's be so uniform. parts would be easy to find ad everyone drove the same car. spray painters would have such an easy time - they only need to stock blue paint! :) in the end - we are humans. variety *IS* part of life. without it our lives would be dull and boring. different toolkits, different looks, different feels, different applications, languages, hell... different devices... are here to stay :) i guess i just don't lik the idea of a thin vertical stack where at each layer 1 choice has been made for me and i'm stuck with it, like it or not, or i move to a whole different stack. eg - must use qt, or must use gtk, or must use efl. allow the choice to be made at the latest stage - not the earliest. i prefer the idea of an ecosystem where all these toolkits and mechanisms get along and co-habitate. jungle vs ivory tower guess... i'm a jungle kinda guy! :) anyone want a banana? :) You can not port your garden variety x11 app to qtopia. Which you can (almost) do with the other frameworks. Any Qt app can be 'ported' easily. Just as with gtk, or efl, or pick-your-toolkit for any library that is on the device. So yes, you _can_ port your garden variety app to Qtopia. It just needs to be written with one common toolkit - Qt. sure, but any non-qt app.. will be a behemoth to port. you either: 1. do a whole port of the app to qt/qtopia (work work work!) (not to mention now that this basically means you pay nokia a license fee, or your app must be GPL, can't be mit-x11, bsd, APL, MPL etc.). 2. you port the toolkit (port gtk, efl, etc. etc.) to qtopia (and this also then follows the above license issue), which when done once at least covers all users of that toolkit, but which is no small feat 3. you write an xserver for qtopia/qws! (the server itself will be GPL or you have to pay nokia), but you avoid license issues... and now anything that uses x11 should work... but the above all require work... a signficant amount of it. -- Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
I just played with Qt Jambi the Trolltech Java UI SDK for Java. It looks good, but will it work under Qtopia? Or only under Qt/X11? I have Jalimo loaded on the FR and of course non of the graphics libs they provide work because they are GTK/X11, so what does it take to use Java to write an app under Qtopia. (For me if I can't do that it is a show stopper for me using Qtopia) I either need Java or Ruby to write to the screen. I presume some people will want python too. There are Qt bindings for Ruby but I think they are Qt/X11 not Qtopia. Any suggestions? Thanks Jim Lorn Potter wrote: Tilman Baumann wrote: And not using x11 is probably a very sane step, if you can live without the portability factor. (That's porting other apps) There is no portability factor. Only which toolkit is available. As one of our engineers here said on our internal discussion (and goes back to rasters comment): One of the neat advantages of Qtopia on Qt for Embedded Linux is that there is little penalty in converting back and forth between a QImage and QPixmap so we have used this extensively which makes quite a few things much easier and more possible than if things are based on X11 where these conversions are expensive and you then need to put a bit more thought in to it. -- Jim Morris, http://blog.wolfman.com ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote: On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:38:35 +1000 Lorn Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: Well, a almost desktop compliant x11 system with a wide variety of frameworks, libs and programming languages. It will be hard to achieve a consistent look and feel across all these toolkits. Not to mention inter process communication. dbus. common look and feel - as long as there is choice and variety, this won't happen. wouldn't we love it if everyone drove a blue ford falcon.it's be so uniform. parts would be easy to find ad everyone drove the same car. spray painters would have such an easy time - they only need to stock blue paint! :) in the end - we are humans. variety *IS* part of life. without it our lives would be dull and boring. different toolkits, different looks, different feels, different applications, languages, hell... different devices... are here to stay :) i guess i just don't lik the idea of a thin vertical stack where at each layer 1 choice has been made for me and i'm stuck with it, like it or not, or i move to a whole different stack. eg - must use qt, or must use gtk, or must use efl. allow the choice to be made at the latest stage - not the earliest. i prefer the idea of an ecosystem where all these toolkits and mechanisms get along and co-habitate. jungle vs ivory tower guess... i'm a jungle kinda guy! :) anyone want a banana? :) I guess you have to define your target audience. The small niche linux hacker group or the larger general phone community that requires a consistent look and feel. Perhaps a good read of the Human Interface Design Principles at apple might do some good. You can not port your garden variety x11 app to qtopia. Which you can (almost) do with the other frameworks. Any Qt app can be 'ported' easily. Just as with gtk, or efl, or pick-your-toolkit for any library that is on the device. So yes, you _can_ port your garden variety app to Qtopia. It just needs to be written with one common toolkit - Qt. sure, but any non-qt app.. will be a behemoth to port. you either: just as any non-toolkit-of-the-day Like porting a qtopia app to gpe. or a windows app to linux. are you going to include win32 or S60 port because they have _way_ more applications written for them. 1. do a whole port of the app to qt/qtopia (work work work!) (not to mention now that this basically means you pay nokia a license fee, or your app must be GPL, can't be mit-x11, bsd, APL, MPL etc.). You want to charge people money for your commercial app? so why is it bad for Trolltech ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Nokia to do the same? GPL ensures that the code and software remains free. Besides, the Neo is touted as a Free your phone phone. Why would you want to install non free apps on it? I could just as easily use any Nokia phone in existence. Actually you are free to license the code you write in any way you want. It just has to be compatible with the license you link it to. No one is stopping you from writing your code in multiple licenses anyway. 2. you port the toolkit (port gtk, efl, etc. etc.) to qtopia (and this also then follows the above license issue), which when done once at least covers all users of that toolkit, but which is no small feat 3. you write an xserver for qtopia/qws! (the server itself will be GPL or you have to pay nokia), but you avoid license issues... and now anything that uses x11 should work... but the above all require work... a signficant amount of it. -- Lorn 'ljp' Potter Software Engineer, Systems Group, Trolltech, a Nokia company ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:36:06 +1000 Lorn Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: i guess i just don't lik the idea of a thin vertical stack where at each layer 1 choice has been made for me and i'm stuck with it, like it or not, or i move to a whole different stack. eg - must use qt, or must use gtk, or must use efl. allow the choice to be made at the latest stage - not the earliest. i prefer the idea of an ecosystem where all these toolkits and mechanisms get along and co-habitate. jungle vs ivory tower guess... i'm a jungle kinda guy! :) anyone want a banana? :) I guess you have to define your target audience. The small niche linux hacker group or the larger general phone community that requires a consistent look and feel. Perhaps a good read of the Human Interface Design Principles at apple might do some good. in that case, maybe we should all have given up - trolltech included, and simply have used windows and visual studio - so we have a consistent os, programming environment, ui toolkit etc. why should there be any variety or choice - i mean... qt is a waste of time competing because it's different to everything else. variety is a fact of life. UNLIKE other platforms we get the chance to support all of the variety - at once easily. other platforms force you into their idea of toolkit, like it or no. at least i dont have to reboot just to run another app using another toolkit... sure, but any non-qt app.. will be a behemoth to port. you either: just as any non-toolkit-of-the-day Like porting a qtopia app to gpe. or a windows app to linux. are you going to include win32 or S60 port because they have _way_ more applications written for them. and so from that point of view - qtopia would be a loser as it has many fewer apps written for it than general X11. :) 1. do a whole port of the app to qt/qtopia (work work work!) (not to mention now that this basically means you pay nokia a license fee, or your app must be GPL, can't be mit-x11, bsd, APL, MPL etc.). You want to charge people money for your commercial app? so why is it bad for Trolltech ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Nokia to do the same? GPL ensures that the code and software remains free. Besides, the Neo is touted as a Free your phone phone. Why would you want to install non free apps on it? I could just as easily use any Nokia phone in existence. i never mentioned commercial apps nor money. your idea of open is not mine - or the next person along's. i prefer the open of mit-x11/bsd, not GPL. all are free, open and cost $0, but GPL places more restrictions. Actually you are free to license the code you write in any way you want. It just has to be compatible with the license you link it to. No one is stopping you from writing your code in multiple licenses anyway. if i want to write a library and license it with a less restrictive, yet still open license, it BECOMES GPL - for all purposes GPL will virally impose itself. this is not the case if i use gtk, sdl, efl etc., but is the case with qt. it then would be my choice, as a developer of open, and free software, to choose a toolkit that doesn't limit my own freedom to license as i please. remember i never talked about charging for software or it being closed. :) -- Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote: On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:36:06 +1000 Lorn Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: i guess i just don't lik the idea of a thin vertical stack where at each layer 1 choice has been made for me and i'm stuck with it, like it or not, or i move to a whole different stack. eg - must use qt, or must use gtk, or must use efl. allow the choice to be made at the latest stage - not the earliest. i prefer the idea of an ecosystem where all these toolkits and mechanisms get along and co-habitate. jungle vs ivory tower guess... i'm a jungle kinda guy! :) anyone want a banana? :) I guess you have to define your target audience. The small niche linux hacker group or the larger general phone community that requires a consistent look and feel. Perhaps a good read of the Human Interface Design Principles at apple might do some good. in that case, maybe we should all have given up - trolltech included, and simply have used windows and visual studio - so we have a consistent os, programming environment, ui toolkit etc. why should there be any variety or choice - i mean... qt is a waste of time competing because it's different to everything else. variety is a fact of life. UNLIKE other platforms we get the chance to support all of the variety - at once easily. other platforms force you into their idea of toolkit, like it or no. at least i dont have to reboot just to run another app using another toolkit... sure, but any non-qt app.. will be a behemoth to port. you either: just as any non-toolkit-of-the-day Like porting a qtopia app to gpe. or a windows app to linux. are you going to include win32 or S60 port because they have _way_ more applications written for them. and so from that point of view - qtopia would be a loser as it has many fewer apps written for it than general X11. :) No, because it is easy to make a Qt app into a Qtopia app. two or three line change in the best case (QApplication - QtopiaApplication and for the menu) 1. do a whole port of the app to qt/qtopia (work work work!) (not to mention now that this basically means you pay nokia a license fee, or your app must be GPL, can't be mit-x11, bsd, APL, MPL etc.). You want to charge people money for your commercial app? so why is it bad for Trolltech ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Nokia to do the same? GPL ensures that the code and software remains free. Besides, the Neo is touted as a Free your phone phone. Why would you want to install non free apps on it? I could just as easily use any Nokia phone in existence. i never mentioned commercial apps nor money. Yes you did. pay for a license' implies both money and you needing a commercial license, which implies you intend on producing closed source applications. your idea of open is not mine - or the next person along's. i prefer the open of mit-x11/bsd, not GPL. all are free, open and cost $0, but GPL places more restrictions. Actually you are free to license the code you write in any way you want. It just has to be compatible with the license you link it to. No one is stopping you from writing your code in multiple licenses anyway. if i want to write a library and license it with a less restrictive, yet still open license, it BECOMES GPL - for all purposes GPL will virally impose itself. this is not the case if i use gtk, sdl, efl etc., but is the case with qt. it then would be my choice, as a developer of open, and free software, to choose a toolkit that doesn't limit my own freedom to license as i please. remember i never talked about charging for software or it being closed. :) So, instead you choose to limit the freedom of your users, which include other developers. btw, kde libs are licensed LGPL. -- Lorn 'ljp' Potter Software Engineer, Systems Group, Trolltech, a Nokia company ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:38:35 +1000 Lorn Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: and so from that point of view - qtopia would be a loser as it has many fewer apps written for it than general X11. :) No, because it is easy to make a Qt app into a Qtopia app. two or three line change in the best case (QApplication - QtopiaApplication and for the menu) still limits it to qt apps only. gtk, xul, fltk, efl, raw xlib... need major work. an x11 environment can ALSO run the qt apps... so it's a superset. 1. do a whole port of the app to qt/qtopia (work work work!) (not to mention now that this basically means you pay nokia a license fee, or your app must be GPL, can't be mit-x11, bsd, APL, MPL etc.). You want to charge people money for your commercial app? so why is it bad for Trolltech ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Nokia to do the same? GPL ensures that the code and software remains free. Besides, the Neo is touted as a Free your phone phone. Why would you want to install non free apps on it? I could just as easily use any Nokia phone in existence. i never mentioned commercial apps nor money. Yes you did. pay for a license' implies both money and you needing a commercial license, which implies you intend on producing closed source applications. no - i meant either i accept GPL, OR i pay for a license TO nokia to AVOID the GPL infecting my software. me paying for a license to not mean i thus obviously am going to make my library app closed and force people to pay for it, but the reality that i have to fork out money to ship something licensed as NOT being GPL, invariably will lead to having to charge for it. your idea of open is not mine - or the next person along's. i prefer the open of mit-x11/bsd, not GPL. all are free, open and cost $0, but GPL places more restrictions. Actually you are free to license the code you write in any way you want. It just has to be compatible with the license you link it to. No one is stopping you from writing your code in multiple licenses anyway. if i want to write a library and license it with a less restrictive, yet still open license, it BECOMES GPL - for all purposes GPL will virally impose itself. this is not the case if i use gtk, sdl, efl etc., but is the case with qt. it then would be my choice, as a developer of open, and free software, to choose a toolkit that doesn't limit my own freedom to license as i please. remember i never talked about charging for software or it being closed. :) So, instead you choose to limit the freedom of your users, which include other developers. how does this limit them? they have access t more apps, more toolkits and more software and have the CHOICE to choose their applications, be they open, or closed, GPL, LGPL, MIT-X11, BSD etc. etc. etc. how does this seem like less freedom to you? btw, kde libs are licensed LGPL. i know. but as they invariably use QT, GPL superceeds LGPL in terms of being more restrictive. -- Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Tilman Baumann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I might do qtopia more wrong than is fair. But they modelling just a regular smart phone like you can get from most vendors. With a very closed (but opensource) framework wich you can develop for. You can not port your garden variety x11 app to qtopia. Which you can (almost) do with the other frameworks. This bias makes no sense. QT is a toolkit. So is GTK. It's OK if you prefer the APIs of one to the other, or prefer plain old C to C++. But what does closed mean? It's been getting more and more open for years now. Finally even QTopia is GPL... I think that's the last piece isn't it? Is it because it already emerged fully-formed, and was not depending on community help for its very existence, that you think it's more closed? What does garden variety mean? I don't think there's any such thing as a garden variety X11 app unless you are using xlib itself, which very few people bother with. Or maybe you are thinking about older toolkits like Motif and Athena Widgets? With QT, apps tend to be smaller because the toolkit is so complete, that you have less code to write. You pay a cost in having a larger library to load, but then all the apps benefit from it. So having a simpler, more spartan toolkit can cut both ways. But whatever, it's just Gnome/KDE all over again, I shouldn't expect a logical argument I guess. And of course the fact that it does not use x11, i expected you to know that. ;-) But the plan is that it will, right? And then we will see, which is really faster. It would be an option in either case to do some optimization: kdrive could accelerate some graphics operations, and QTopia-on-framebuffer could do the same. All else being equal, the one with fewer layers ought to be faster. But kdrive is likely to get more community attention, so maybe we will realistically see some hardware acceleration eventually. It really depends, many people like the simple qtopia stack. But i did not buy my Neo to have a phone that does essentially what any better Motorola or Nokia could do too. Anyone can write new QT apps. It's even fun, and fairly rapid development compared to typical C/C++. The Motorola phones unfortunately made it difficult to install them though, used a very old version of QT, and customized it too, so garden-variety QT apps aren't too well integrated even if you can get them to run. I think Nokia smartphones were mostly running Symbian until recently; I don't have experience with their QT models (if they have some already). It would look great on a motorla razr (or however these things are called today) But i did not find it to fit very well on the extremely large screen resolution and touchpad only input. The RAZR used a completely proprietary OS and toolkit. The high-end touchscreen phones are exactly the ones that are mostly running QT or Symbian, in the commercial world. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Why is Qtopia much faster?
This might be a stupid question, but it isn't the first and will not be the last stupid one I ask :). I have glimpsed at the 2007.2, ASU and qtopia image (the latest builds) and a very noticable difference is the speed. Will this improve in the ASU and the 2007.2 or should I not get my hopes on? Qtopia just responds and seems to load everything faster. Kind regards, Yorick ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
I don't really know for sure but if i had to guess id say it's probably because Qtopia has been around much longer and so is more optimised. Probably has much less debug code enabled as well.. Ben. Yorick Moko wrote: This might be a stupid question, but it isn't the first and will not be the last stupid one I ask :). I have glimpsed at the 2007.2, ASU and qtopia image (the latest builds) and a very noticable difference is the speed. Will this improve in the ASU and the 2007.2 or should I not get my hopes on? Qtopia just responds and seems to load everything faster. Kind regards, Yorick ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Yorick Moko wrote: This might be a stupid question, but it isn't the first and will not be the last stupid one I ask :). I have glimpsed at the 2007.2, ASU and qtopia image (the latest builds) and a very noticable difference is the speed. Will this improve in the ASU and the 2007.2 or should I not get my hopes on? Qtopia just responds and seems to load everything faster. Qtopia has a more integrated aproach. They load plugins for different features. (AFAIK) And the other systems launch new programs for each task. Sometimes even based on different frameworks. (e,gtk,qt) There are ideas how to speed them up. Like pre-loading or integrating the basic phone apps into one binary. If you want speed now, take qtopia. What you get is a phone. The other systems go a few steps further... -- Drucken Sie diese Mail bitte nur auf Recyclingpapier aus. Please print this mail only on recycled paper. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Tilman Baumann wrote: Yorick Moko wrote: This might be a stupid question, but it isn't the first and will not be the last stupid one I ask :). I have glimpsed at the 2007.2, ASU and qtopia image (the latest builds) and a very noticable difference is the speed. Will this improve in the ASU and the 2007.2 or should I not get my hopes on? Qtopia just responds and seems to load everything faster. Qtopia has a more integrated aproach. They load plugins for different features. (AFAIK) And the other systems launch new programs for each task. Sometimes even based on different frameworks. (e,gtk,qt) There are ideas how to speed them up. Like pre-loading or integrating the basic phone apps into one binary. If you want speed now, take qtopia. What you get is a phone. The other systems go a few steps further... how so? -- Lorn 'ljp' Potter Software Engineer, Systems Group, Trolltech, a Nokia company ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:11:25 +0200 Yorick Moko [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: This might be a stupid question, but it isn't the first and will not be the last stupid one I ask :). I have glimpsed at the 2007.2, ASU and qtopia image (the latest builds) and a very noticable difference is the speed. Will this improve in the ASU and the 2007.2 or should I not get my hopes on? Qtopia just responds and seems to load everything faster. he real major problem is qt/qtopia and the x11 output. it is amazingly inefficient. it does a whole set of no-no's when it comes to performance (like uploading and downloading pixmaps and converting to/from image formats... repeatedly). if you want things to work well in x11: 1. only upload when you need a pixmap or data on screen... dont upload until you need it. 2. never repeatedly upload if u can do it just once, so defer uploads of pixel data as late as possible. 3. NEVER download (get images) from x. this will kill performance as it 1, stalls your app into waiting on x, 2, needs to wait for data to be read from video ram (slow - even on desktop systems), 3, causes yet more context switching which is expensive on ARM. one reason EFL gets the performance it does is it has an almost 1 way pipeline with everything deferred as much a possible. be it software rendering or xrender etc. - everything happens as late as possible. it never downloads data from x... and man all of this really helps. -- Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Am 21.07.2008 um 20:08 schrieb Lorn Potter: Tilman Baumann wrote: Yorick Moko wrote: This might be a stupid question, but it isn't the first and will not be the last stupid one I ask :). I have glimpsed at the 2007.2, ASU and qtopia image (the latest builds) and a very noticable difference is the speed. Will this improve in the ASU and the 2007.2 or should I not get my hopes on? Qtopia just responds and seems to load everything faster. Qtopia has a more integrated aproach. They load plugins for different features. (AFAIK) And the other systems launch new programs for each task. Sometimes even based on different frameworks. (e,gtk,qt) There are ideas how to speed them up. Like pre-loading or integrating the basic phone apps into one binary. If you want speed now, take qtopia. What you get is a phone. The other systems go a few steps further... how so? Well, a almost desktop compliant x11 system with a wide variety of frameworks, libs and programming languages. Openmoko is by design more something like a mobile computing platform wich has GSM too. I might do qtopia more wrong than is fair. But they modelling just a regular smart phone like you can get from most vendors. With a very closed (but opensource) framework wich you can develop for. You can not port your garden variety x11 app to qtopia. Which you can (almost) do with the other frameworks. And of course the fact that it does not use x11, i expected you to know that. ;-) It really depends, many people like the simple qtopia stack. But i did not buy my Neo to have a phone that does essentially what any better Motorola or Nokia could do too. Regards Tilman ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Why is Qtopia much faster?
Tilman Baumann wrote: Am 21.07.2008 um 20:08 schrieb Lorn Potter: Tilman Baumann wrote: Yorick Moko wrote: This might be a stupid question, but it isn't the first and will not be the last stupid one I ask :). I have glimpsed at the 2007.2, ASU and qtopia image (the latest builds) and a very noticable difference is the speed. Will this improve in the ASU and the 2007.2 or should I not get my hopes on? Qtopia just responds and seems to load everything faster. Qtopia has a more integrated aproach. They load plugins for different features. (AFAIK) And the other systems launch new programs for each task. Sometimes even based on different frameworks. (e,gtk,qt) There are ideas how to speed them up. Like pre-loading or integrating the basic phone apps into one binary. If you want speed now, take qtopia. What you get is a phone. The other systems go a few steps further... how so? Well, a almost desktop compliant x11 system with a wide variety of frameworks, libs and programming languages. It will be hard to achieve a consistent look and feel across all these toolkits. Not to mention inter process communication. Openmoko is by design more something like a mobile computing platform wich has GSM too. I might do qtopia more wrong than is fair. But they modelling just a regular smart phone like you can get from most vendors. With a very closed (but opensource) framework wich you can develop for. You can not port your garden variety x11 app to qtopia. Which you can (almost) do with the other frameworks. Any Qt app can be 'ported' easily. Just as with gtk, or efl, or pick-your-toolkit for any library that is on the device. So yes, you _can_ port your garden variety app to Qtopia. It just needs to be written with one common toolkit - Qt. And of course the fact that it does not use x11, i expected you to know that. ;-) It really depends, many people like the simple qtopia stack. But i did not buy my Neo to have a phone that does essentially what any better Motorola or Nokia could do too. Qtopia is not simple. The ui is (or should be), as that is needed on these devices that are screen real estate challenged. What do the other 'stacks' available for neo do any better? -- Lorn 'ljp' Potter Software Engineer, Systems Group, Trolltech, a Nokia company ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
