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Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

KDE.News covers the release of version 4.0 of the Qt GUI toolkit by Trolltech. "Trolltech has released Qt 4.0 both under commercial and GPL licenses for X11, Mac OS X and MS Windows. It is the first time that a MS Windows GPL edition is available. To celebrate the release Trolltech employees have created a song and a music video." This release emphasizes cross-platform development, see the Trolltech announcement for more information.
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Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 28, 2005 15:33 UTC (Tue) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link]

I wonder whether a future KDE 4.x couldn't toss out a number of its own libraries and subsystems because they are now natively provided by Qt.

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 28, 2005 21:02 UTC (Tue) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link]

Not that I know anything about this, but: It would be simpler yes.

On the other hand, the KDE libs are GPL/LGPL but Qt is only GPL (or proprietary). In practice it doesn't make much of a difference, since you have Qt as the only alternative for the KDE libs anyway. So maybe they will, who knows.

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 28, 2005 21:03 UTC (Tue) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link]

Woohaa! So when can I install KOffice and Konqueror and Kontact on my friends Windowses and give OpenOffice and Mozilla some well deserved competition?

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 28, 2005 21:21 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Well... You know, this being free software and all that -- and mostly done by people in their
copious spare time... It's like this: when kdelibs has been ported by hackers who are better than
me, then some other hackers who are better than me, too, will start porting the koffice libs. And
when that's done, then, I, a lowly application hacker, can start porting Krita to Qt 4. Possibly I'll
take advantage of new features: that'll slow the porting effort down. No doubt, the better
hackers who work on the libraries will also want to clean up & profit from the new features,
meaning they'll spend more time than strictly necessary for the simplest kind of port, the kind of
port where you do nothing but resolve incompatibilities.

And then, when that's done, then other hackers, smaller in number, because, well, you need to
be a serious masochist to hack in your spare time on a Windows project, will have a solid base to
start porting kde4 + koffice2-for-kde4 to Windows. And then, well, then, you'll have lost a
strong argument to switch your friends over to a free operating system.

And, no, there's no way anybody can tell when that will happen; but if you are really, really, really
interested it seeing happen, you know what to do about it, don't you?

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 28, 2005 21:46 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Actually, Konqueror can win a lot once web designers can run it natively on the same platform as MSIE. Web pages will be more standard compliant, new bugs in Konqueror will be found and fixed, maybe a few Windows programmers will help with coding.

Krita can win some users and contributors as well, maybe even more than The GIMP, which is somewhat limited on Windows due to its multi-window interface that almost requires multiple desktops for any serious work.

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 29, 2005 23:00 UTC (Wed) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

It should be easier than that. All you need to do is reverse-engineer the DLL that handles the underlying window management, write a GPLed clone of it, and have it support the X protocol as a wrapper. Then, you add a new DLL which provides an IBCS wrapper to translate Linux system calls into Windows system calls. Finally, you compile a copy of glibc to use the IBCSed Unix-like API. Then, KDE and friends should run natively without any further changes.

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jul 1, 2005 10:40 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

That doesn't sound easy at all. Are you a Troll™?

Building KDE on Qt4 to run on Windows will be a matter of weeding out Windows-incompatible Unix-isms, which should(!) all be concentrated in the lowest-level libraries. Reverse-enginering the Windows 'window management DLL' sounds scary :-).

"... a new DLL which provides an IBCS wrapper to translate Linux system calls into Windows system calls ..."

This is what Cygwin tries to do (without the 'IBCS' buzzword). It's a *hard* problem.

In the meantime Cygwin supports many KDE apps. That's about as 'native' as what you're suggesting.

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 30, 2005 16:17 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

So when can I install KOffice and Konqueror and Kontact on my friends Windowses and give OpenOffice and Mozilla some well deserved competition?

As far as I know, Qt is not free on Windows platform, which could hinder the porting of KDE to Windows.

Bye,NAR

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 30, 2005 18:01 UTC (Thu) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link]

Please, re-read the summary at the top.

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 30, 2005 19:55 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

It depends on your definition of "free". As of version 4, Qt for Windows is free enough for KDE to be linked against it.

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0 (KDE.News)

Posted Jul 1, 2005 8:34 UTC (Fri) by henning (subscriber, #13406) [Link]

Ok, if you don't like that trolltech wants to make some money with
commercial software development, than qt is still not "free". ;-)

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