I love Qt, which is one reason I work for Trolltech^WQtsoftware in Nokia. and thanks to the efforts of the qt4 on maemo project Maemo Qt4, there is yet another platform/device open to any application that is created with Qt4.

Here is my old-yet-updated Gutenbrowser project on Maemo on n810. (the copyright on gutenbrowser is 1998-2008! now). I don’t work on it as much as it needs. Especially now with rug rats and yard apes about.

All it took was a recompile!

Just install the scratchbox sdk for maemo. Grab the qt4 for Maemo sources, compile, install them, and your good to go! hmmm… what’s next?

A great deal of things are happening for Qt right now. Very exciting news:
Qt frontend for Mozilla engine (or, rather, has finally been dusted off and updated) Now we have two of the best browser backends to choose from. (or three if you want to use that ActiveX thing)

and

Nokia gives out free N810 devices to developers in Akademy 2008. Wow, thats a heap of n810’s to throw around.

Too bad Kate forgot to mention the other talks from Nokia:

• Harald - Programming for embedded Linux
• Andreas - How Graphics View Works
• Simon - QtWebKit! (We are part of Nokia now).

and not to forget about former Trolls

• Girish - OpenDocument support in KWord 2
• and playboy Zack’s talk on Gallium3D - Graphics Done Right

And if course, I cannot really yet mention all the really powerful great stuff being developed at Qt Sofware/Nokia.. but I really want too! Because its just too cool and will blow your minds.

After many moons, I have started to work again on my personal project, Gutenbrowser. It is in need of much maintenance and love.

Since Qt finally has a good webview, QWebView, I can finally start working towards version 1.0! With very little work, gutenbrowser can now show Gutenberg Project etexts that come with images.

Since I have a macmini at home, I can distribute Mac binaries, as well as Windows and a few Linux embedded devices (Openmoko Neo and possibly Nokia’s n8×0’s Qtopia )
and with the help of Petter Reinholdtsen, fix a few bugs and be in the standard Debian distribution.

For those that do not know of the Gutenberg Project, there are over 25,000 free books available!

Well,
I start work for a different company today, namely Nokia. Perhaps you have heard of them? No? Well, they used to make rubber boots but now make phones. Lot’s of them. They have a few employees. Lot’s of them. and now, a few more, thanks to the (more or less) peaceful assimilation of Trolltech.

Am I worried? A bit. The management structure at Nokia is overbearing, not like Trolltech’s lean and mean machine. I doubt I will see the CEO of Nokia getting drunk and wrestling with engineers any time soon. I doubt I will ever be called to a meeting with him to pick my brain about community matters, much less even get an email from him. I liked that about Trolltech. The openness, the friendliness.
Hopefully my boss will stop wearing his shoes so much. He used to go barefoot a lot more than he does now. I liked that about him.

Today, I start work for Nokia, sitting in the same desk (I hope), loging into the same machines (I hope), and continuing my work from yesterday (except today is the BBQ beer fest.. wweeeeeeeeeee!), on the Qtopia SDK, on the n8×0 and Neo devices. I still get to work with the greatest multi licensed cross platform toolkit ever - Qt. I get to use the greatest and Kool Desktop Environment - blackboxqt! heh and also - KDE.

Best of all - I get a new phone and some Nokia schwag.

I, for one, welcome our new Nokia overlords!

Well,
This is my last post as a Trolltech employee. I have worked for Trolltech Pty Ltd, in Australia. since 2003. I can proudly say I helped Qtopia become more open, and fully GPL. It’s been a short 5 or so years, I have seen the Brisbane office grow from around 14 people to around 50, found my wife, had a son and daughter. A lot has happened in the past years. Ran ‘make’ more times that I want to think about. Got Qtopia running on all the devices I could. Yelled and complained and praised till I was blue in the face.

Tomorrow (Tuesday), I will be employed by Nokia, doing the same things I did today (well, maybe the day after next, tomorrow is the obigitory write-off “1st day”, BBQ and beer drinking).

It will be a challenging year ahead, I am sure both Nokia and Trolltech ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Qt Software have things to learn from one another. I am personally wishing Trolltech’s seeds of open source will blossom Nokia into a greater thing.

So tonight, while I am unemployed, am going to live it up! and… uh… well… write some code (having small kids really saps your energy) and get more familiar with scratchbox2. (which thankfully uses a real cross toolchain).

I feel it is a bit like Christmas… So, if you talk to a Troll today, shake his/her hand and tell him/her thanks for making the world a more peaceful place.

In case you missed it, it is now official
Trolltech merges with Nokia

But do not be scared, my open source friends. This means that Qt and Qtopia will continue to be developed, and have even wider recognition that it is the greatest cross platform GUI toolkit on the planet.

More info here

I am sure there will be more press releases coming soon, so I won’t comment on anything else that might happen. But I can say this, this merger is a two way street. i.e. Nokia wants to learn from Trolltech and Trolltech can learn from Nokia.

What I wonder, is if Nokia can make a rubber boot for my phone. After all, it has been fairly rainy here in Brisbane this year.

Remember, “Trolltech has benefited greatly from the feedback the community has been providing while using Qt to develop free software. We respect the symbiotic relationship Qt has with the community and we wish to continue and enhance this relationship.”

So, keep on hackin’ Qt, Qtopia and Kde hackers, there’s good things around the corner!!

It’s been a long time since I have blogged anything. Been busy finding a new house to live in, then moving house, then holiday/being sick at Waikiki in Hawaii. Waikiki is much like the Gold Coast here in Queensland, except people there wear shoes, and tops. Australia is much more baby/family friendly, although. My 2 years old son finally conquered his fear of ocean waves, and was happily swimming in the ocean. Now we just need to wait for summer here so we can go swimming at the beach.

Been working on Qtopia integrations on the ficgta02 and n810 and readying for the upcoming Qtopia 4.4 release.

In particular dynamic rotation. Still small things to be fixed up for Qtopia 4, as a late addition to the Qtopia 4 game. We used to have it way back in Qtopia 1 and 2, but for Qtopia 4 it was never ported or really thought about, as most devices we were developing for did not need it, or didn’t really seem sensible to have it. But the Neo and n800/n810 are different. In particular, the Neo, has no buttons, so it can be oriented in any direction.

Qtopia 4 is much more complicated than Qtopia 2, with theming, styling and all that jazz.

Qtopia on the Openmoko Neo (ficgta01 and ficgta02) is mostly working. The Openmoko folks have picked up on Qtopia on X11 porting/demo code we had done, and started working more extensively on it for the Neo phones. They plan on trying to meld Qtopia with Enlightenment stuff. Or at least make them work together. Who says Qt and Gtk can’t live together?

Qtopia on n800/n810 is coming along nicely as well. We made the n810 rotate whenever the keyboard is slid in or out. Being in portrait mode when in and using the few buttons it has that way. Probably the most difficult thing for the n810 so far was the keyboard driver, going back to the days of the Sharp Zaurus qwerty keyboard.

Other projects going on I cannot speak of, but they generally benefit Qtopia.

I dont usually plug other products, but I just bought a retro bluetooth handset, and I love it.
retro handset

The amazing thing is, by 2.5 year old son, who has never really said more than a few words on a phone before, took it and had a complete conversation with his granny! I was stunned. The retro handset is just the natural way a phone should be! It’s just more natural.

To stay on topic, this thing works great on my Openmoko phone running Qtopia!

Lots has been happening downunder lately. Namely, summer has come and gone. Wasn’t too hot this year, but rained heaps. Causing my pitiful electric mower to die a horrible death on my back yard that was in some spots, a meter tall. Several lawn mowing services balked at the idea of mowing it, so I bit the big one, and bought a petrol mower. How I hate mowing grass, it goes against nature, is noisy and smelly. My daughter of almost 6 months has started sitting and somewhat getting some sort of locomotion going, although it usually ends up in tears, because she wants to just jump into the whole walking thing like her brother and everyone else does. My 2.5 year old son started painting. Luckily not on the walls, but on an easel.

On the Trolltech front, besides the whole Nokia thing, we released Qtopia 4.3.1 SDK for Neo. What better way to create software for Qtopia for your FIC Neo. It seems that OpenMoko have been slowly coming around to officially using Qtopia, in some sort.

Other than the SDK I have been busy preparing the Qtopia 4.4 webkit demonstration, that was at 3GSM, errr MWC. Cool things are possible with webkit in Qtopia. Although it is rather large, the sizes of flash memory can be quite large, and most phones now have huge amounts of space, classing them not in the embedded space any longer.

The Neuros OSD I have has some competition, as I bought an already-configured-for-Australian-use series 1, Oztivo’ified Tivo (thanks Ian!), (for research purposes, my dear wife!). Neuros really needs some scheduling information, they know it, and have put up a bounty
What I like about the Neuros OSD over the tivo is it’s size. The tivo is just huge, like a regular desktop box, and has cooling fans. The OSD has sexy curves, is sleek, glossy black and silent. Makes me want to lick it. Not to mention Neuros will be using Qt Embedded, errr Qtopia Core soon.

I feel bad about my old Sharp Zaurus 5000d’s. Gathering dust, or played with by my son, until he realizes they need charging. Perhaps I will charge them up…

Almost forgot to mention, I have been putting together a virtual keyboard for X11 using Qt. Based largely on kvkbd for kde, but reads the keys and keycodes from an xml file. It works too!

tsdogs, who is one of the HTC-linux guys (who have ported linux to HTC Universal phones and friends), recently gotten embeddedkonsole 4 to run on Qtopia 4. It’s named qterminal and I have put a qpk package for the Neo at qtopia.net. For those who think they need a terminal on their phone. The HTC-linux guys have done quite a lot to hack Linux onto these phones, although it needs to be run from an sd card. The sources can be found in the unofficial Qtopia git repository : git clone git://git.asheesh.org/qtopia_snapshot.git

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!!!)