Free Software & Linux & Maemo Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri on 20 Dec 2006 12:19 am
Qtopia 4.2 is now GPL!
Trolltech Qtopia was the first framework that enabled GNU/Linux to run on embedded systems, like Sharp Zaurus, that did great by end of this decade.
While it did great, being based on Trolltech Qt, it was version 2 and while Qt improved a lot in version 3, Qtopia was never updated and no free version was available.
Now Qt is in its 4th generation and have great improvements, like painting system (Arthur, similar to Cairo) and text engine (Scribe, similar to Pango). They have a really easy and intuitive API, while being very optimized, Arthur supporting even OpenGL-ES. And the big news was that Qtopia was upgraded to cope with Qt4, making things interesting again that Gtk was doing its first inroads on embedded systems.
The bad news so far was that Qtopia4 was closed source, but since Trolltech announced their Greenphone people were asking Trolltech to release it. Being a good Open Source citizen, they did a wonderful announcement releasing Qtopia 4.2 as GPL.
Great work Trolltech! Now I just hope someone will have it running on Nokia 770, bringing some competition to Maemo, at least some speed comparisons.
2 Responses to “Qtopia 4.2 is now GPL!”
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on 24 Mar 2007 at 10:37 pm 1.ghellman said …
I have both Qtopia 2.2.0 (PDA edition) Qtopia 4.2.1 (phone edition) running on the Nokia770 using a comercial Embedded Linux based on 2.6.14 kernel and GCC 3.4.4 as cross-compiler. I am not a Linux or Qtopia expert, but so far the Qtopia 2.2.0 version is much faster then the 4.2.1 . Getting it to work was purly finding the right configuration. I will be more then happy to share ti with you if you are intrested, mybe you can get it to run faster
on 24 Mar 2007 at 10:51 pm 2.Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri said …
Really cool!
It would be really great to have it as a flasher-image download so other can test.
About me making it faster… well, I’m already quite busy with next Canola, so probably no :-/
But at Bossa Conference, I’ve talked to Zack and he said guys there are doing a great work on getting it faster. Maybe it doesn’t get as fast as 2.2, but it will have more useful features… let’s wait for their 4.3 release.