I am writing now from the Trolltech booth at FISL, where the KDE contributors have also taken up shop. It’s the second of three days and I’m already very tired. I was very surprised by the toll that booth duty takes in such a large conference!

FISL (International Free Software Forum, in its acronym in Portuguese) is held yearly in the city of Porto Alegre, of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. It is probably the largest South American event and one of the largest in the world. Yesterday I’m told there were 7000 people walking by and today it’s probably going to be even more, since it’s Friday. This is the first time that Trolltech has a booth here, but technically not the first that it has had presence.

At several points in time yesterday, we had our 3m x 3m booth packed with people listening to my ramblings (or Knut’s, or Helio’s, or Josef’s more constructive speeches). Questions ranged from people who wanted to know what Qt was and if it could be used for their application purposes (”Does Qt have forms?” or “Do I have to know C++?”), to people who were asking about Qt 4.4 new features, such as WebKit and Phonon.

There were also people asking about KDE 4 and its current state. Hélio had a nice presentation yesterday showing the state of things. Today, Kévin Ottens from KDAB is holding an introductory course to Qt4 development. Later on, there’ll be a KDE-Edu presentation by Maurício Piacentini (the KDE Games coordinator) and one by Andreas Hanssen on the future of graphics development in Qt. He says it’s Qt 4.6 material…

We also had people asking about Java and other languages. I was pleased to be able to tell them about Jambi, but I think I need to learn I lot more about it. Thankfully, Helio downloaded and installed Qt/Jambi on one of the demo computers here. It’s packaged by Mandriva, so it was a matter of a few commands only.

What amazed me was how much crowd two books and one Greenphone attract. Lots of people asked us when the Greenphone would be on the market — to which we had to answer that it’s already over. They also kept on asking if we were selling the C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 books we had on display.

Things to remember for next time:

• Bring A4 or A5 leaflets with information on Trolltech
• Bring a set of small loudspeakers so that the Qt4 Dance video can be heard

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!!!)

Ok, I have had to restrain myself for a few weeks now about this exciting and dramatic news..

“Qtopia Phone Edition to be completely open source under GPL license; Trolltech adds Neo as an open hardware platform for Qtopia development”

http://trolltech.com/company/newsroom/announcements/press.2007-09-17.9260755578

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5429713730.html

WOOT!

Trolltech is presenting the fourth annual Developer Days events[1] in the US
and Germany. We invite free software developers to join without admittance
fee.

http://trolltech.com/company/newsroom/events/allevents/devdays2007

The events are taking place in Redwood City, California (October 3 & 4), and
Munich, Germany (October 16th & 17). If you are currently contributing to an
open source project, and would like to apply for free registration to the
event, please send us a short mail at devdays2007@trolltech.com, listing the
following:

Your Name:
Name of the open source project you actively contributing to:
URL for more project information:

We will review your entry and respond with registration information if
you qualify. We hope to see you at Developer Days!

Code name: Gurgle.

a new baby troll in Australia! baby Girl , born just 6 hours shy of the full lunar eclipse! 3:35 am. August 29, 2007.. Is 50.5 cm (19.8 “) long and, 3.56 kg (7 lbs, 14 oz) of joy.

Just in time for Fathers day here in Australia!
Took us exactly 9 months to code and 18 or so hours to compile.

[edit]
We came up with a release name! Jasmine Kiarra Vanessa Potter!

After a long dormancy, (the last qtopia snapshots available were from the 1.6 series), I am pleased to say that Qtopia snapshots have returned!

They are available for the 4 series from here:
ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qtopia/snapshots

As with Qtopia 4 series source code, these packages contain everything to compile Qtopia and all Trolltech’s tools needed for developing - Qt x11, Qtopia Core and Qtopia (not including the toolchain compiler and other system dependencies), are licensed under the GPL to ensure the code and it’s derivative’s remain free software. You want more free software, right?

All hail Free Software!

While others are touting about their linux phone stuff as being “the future”, and “the first open source Linux phone”, Trolltech has the future and the worlds first open source Linux phone right now.

Qtopia Greenphone!

You can make phone calls, send SMS messages, AND easily add your own customized functionality, right now!. (they would too, had they used Qtopia) Heck you can even use it as your primary phone. I have been using mine for almost a year now.

You can hack on applications all you want, because Qtopia is GPL, and will always remain GPL. As an open source developer for more than 5 years now, I just don’t get the LGPL and why advocates of free, open source software keep using that license. Do you want more proprietary closed source or software that will always be free?

Back to the Greenphone, in phone bounce mode, you can use the modem from your desktop. You can ssh into the device and get a console. Play audio and video, using the highly optimized Helix libraries. And, if you are like me, you can write your own Shopping list and bar recipe applications to impress your friends and bartender.

We have created an SDK that runs in a virtual machine so you can develop from Windows or Mac. We have a simple script that builds the root filesystem (complete with the toolchain!). No having to install unstable and complicated distribution building tools that eat your hard disk space and make you want to poke your eyes out with a spork.

We have done so much work on Qtopia for the Greenphone, it would make your head spin and let the blue smoke out of your computer! We have a huge team of dedicated professional engineers, working night and day (Europe + Australia!) bringing you the best and easiest gui toolkit in the world to use (when we are not playing ping-pong or drinking beer).

Best of all, the Greenphone is an awesome shade of green and does not look like a hockey puck!

[edit]
Just so everyone knows, these are my personal opinions.

It has been difficult to not talk about this, but Trolltech has finally announced one of the pet projects I have worked on…

the Greenphone Innovation Program!!

If you are a developer and have wanted a Greenphone (for free!), and have a great idea for an application that you will develop, this is your chance for getting a free Greenphone!

Among the many changes happening for Qtopia 4.3, is a really nice new default theme look.

Have a look! What do you think?

Trolltech announces a Greenphone developer challenge.

Win a Greenphone!

More details at:
http://www.trolltech.com/gpchallenge