Trolltech’s Qtopia sdk runs inside a vmware virtual machine.

Since VMware is not open source, and does not have a free Mac OSX client, I began looking for an open source vm, and found one called VirtualBox. Not only is this open source, but it is cross platform - Linux, Windows and Mac OS X (Intel only). oh joy!

With the latest version, at least on Windows, you can easily use it to run virtual machine created for vmware, including the scsi disks. This makes it possible to run the Greenphone and upcoming FIC Neo Qtopia SDK in an open source virtual machine (more or less).

I had to do a few things to make it work:

• Install qtopia SDK
• Create a new virtualbox
• add the rootfs.vmdk (as Primary Master), qtopia.vmdk (as Primary Slave) and toolchain.vmdk (as Secondary Slave) (for version 4.3.1 you will only have to use the rootfs.vmdk, or even install your fav linux distribution like Kubuntu)
• Start vm
• log into root
• remove vmware-tools entry from /etc/rc5.d
• run dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg to reconfigure the X server
• once into X, mount the drives mount /dev/hdb1 -t auto /opt/Qtopia and mount /dev/hdd1 -t auto /usr/local
• for version 4.3.1, you can mount the qtopia.iso and tar -xvpjf the files to the right spots

*Notes* - the eth device seemed to come up as eth1
- export PATH=/opt/Qtopia/SDK/scripts:$PATH

One cool thing about the free virtualbox over vmware, is the use of shared host directories. The VM can mount directories on your host machine! and, another of course, is that it’s open source. I didn’t try to compile the VirtualBox source because I am lazy. As well, it seems to have support for serial ports too (good for the Neuros OSD!).

It did seem to have some bugs with USB handling. lsusb seemed to think that all usbdevices are 0000:0000 ;( which might be a problem.
and it kept failing to ‘attach’ to any USB device I threw at it.

To install the virtualbox guest additions, I had to sudo mount /dev/hdc -o remount,ro,exec

VirtualBox downloads

This means I can also run the Neuros OSD SDK in a virtualbox machine as well!

At any rate. the year end holidays are a bit different here than I am used to. For one, it’s summer, and hot. Well, it would be hot if it weren’t raining for the last two weeks (drought? you call this a drought?!?). Starting to feel a bit soggy, but it is supposed to dry up. Santa wears short pants, and still sweats heaps. Instead of having a nice dinner by the cozy fire, people are outside, at the beach, having a BBQ (even when it rains, thanks to covered areas).

2007 was a great year!

• We got Qtopia running and making voice calls and txt messages on the FIC Neo phone in one week.
• Vast improvements in Qt and Qtopia that happened.
• TT hired more and more KDE, Opie and open source developers.
• Qt webit
• my daughter Jasmine was born

and tons a stuff I haven’t or can’t mention

oh, did I mention the December issue of Linux Journal has an interesting article “Security in Qtopia Phones”?

It’s gonna be a great 2008! (C’mon KDE 4!!!)