Re: cheap international roaming/wi-fi calls

[Sébastien Lorquet]

Hi,

I guess they use VoIP and doesn't provide seamless handover... do they? I
didn't find this information.

-- 
Sébastien LORQUET - 이세영 (李世榮)
Ingénieur ENSPG 2006 / ENSIMAG-ASI 2007
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Re: Neo 1973 certification in Russia (Rostest)

[Bartlomiej Zdanowski]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] pisze:

Corean company FIC releases Neo 1973 smartphone:
  

Sorry - FIC is from Taiwan.


--
*Bartlomiej Zdanowski*
Programmer
Product Research & Development Department
AutoGuard S.A.

Place of registration: Regional Court for the Capital City of Warsaw
Registration no.: 287629
Share capital: 1 059 000 PLN
Polish VAT and tax ID no.: PL1132219747
Omulewska 27 street
04-128 Warsaw
Poland
phone +48 22 611 69 23
www.autoguard.pl 
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Re: Screen shots of Qtopia on Neo and some thoughts

[Bartlomiej Zdanowski]

Jeremy G pisze:

I would be so disappointed if the OpenMoko devs gave up.  Don't get me
  

That would be horrible :-/
I think Qtopia is finally and fully open to gain some new developers 
from our community. Because of it maturity I suppose some of Openmoko 
developers would be interested in having it and developing it. So Qtopia 
gained another developing plaform - Neo.

Don't give up guys, OM needs you! :-)


--
*Bartlomiej Zdanowski*
Programmer
Product Research & Development Department
AutoGuard S.A.

Place of registration: Regional Court for the Capital City of Warsaw
Registration no.: 287629
Share capital: 1 059 000 PLN
Polish VAT and tax ID no.: PL1132219747
Omulewska 27 street
04-128 Warsaw
Poland
phone +48 22 611 69 23
www.autoguard.pl 
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Re: Screen shots of Qtopia on Neo and some thoughts

[Doug Sutherland]

> My hope is that this marks the end of closed phones.

Not a chance. The providers want custom firmware that 
leads you to their pay per use service, pay per item content, 
the recurring charge subscriptions, and the associated data
charges. 

The relationship between providers and phone manufacturers
is much like between PC hardware manufacturers and the 
software and integrators. They together force consumers to
need more RAM, more this, new mobo, etc. Installing linux
on motherboards tends to void warranties, which makes no
sense, but is the way of the world.

Nokia et al have no business without providers and will 
never stray too far from a very controlled software build.
They dabble in linux with the 770 but do you really think
service providers will sign onto full open source?



 

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RE: Screen shots of Qtopia on Neo and some thoughts

[thomas.cooksey]

>Two complete distributions you can install and run on the same hardware?
>Both free? (not counting Sun since I can't get my paws on that one...)
>That's the real revolution here, and I would say this proves Sean's
>point of doing this in the first place...

Can't agree more, the whole idea of a hackable phone is fantastic. Why I joined 
the SVHMPC and why I've spent over $1000 on development kits to build my own 
mobile phone. Shame I only heard about OpenMoko _after_ I shelled out a grand. 
:-(

My hope is that this marks the end of closed phones. A Nokia, iPhone or Razer I 
can put my own OS onto?!? That's cool.

 
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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[thomas.cooksey]

>After the docs come out, it should be possible to write a Mesa driver
>right?  My impression is OpenGL ES is just a subset of regular OpenGL;
>it's not so different that Mesa APIs would not work.  Then the whole
>X/GLX/Mesa/driver/DRI stack could be used.

Writing a 3D graphics driver is a big project, but I guess it is possible if 
the docs are avaliable. I spoke to Zack Ruskin a few weeks ago about adding 
OpenGL ES support into Mesa. From the very brief conversation we had he seemed 
to think that it wouldn't be too difficult. The main difference between OpenGL 
and OpenGL ES (apart from the greatly reduced set of operations) is that OpenGL 
ES only accepts fixed-point data types. Zack was saying that for speed reasons, 
large portions of the Mesa paths are implemented as fixed point already.


>I think XRender does take advantage of whatever acceleration the X
>driver implements.

>From what I've read, the X.org XAA does a very bad job of allowing XRender to 
>be accelerated and was one of the reasons why X.Org has a new video driver 
>model. I assume KDrive uses it's own driver API which isn't hampered by 
>limitations of XAA?


>If there is offscreen memory, bitmap glyphs for the fonts that you are
>using can be cached

Surely offscreen pixmaps can also be accelerated, I.e. a pixmap based theme 
engine would be greatly accelerated?


>I'd like to see accelerated Bezier curves too, but not sure if that's possible.

XLib doesn't do Beizier curves, only arcs, so there's nothing to accelerate in 
the X server. Bezier curves have to be rendered client side (Unlike Qtopia).


>I think for the ultimate in eye candy, using OpenGL pretty directly
>with as few layers as possible between your OpenGL app and the
>hardware would be the way to go.  (I'm pretty sure that's what Apple
>does.)  But OpenGL doesn't do windowing, so you either have to write
>some new windowing code or depend on X to manage that part, or just
>run every app full-screen.  And almost every idea along these lines
>has some sort of implementation out there somewhere already... like
>Fresco, for example.

Qtopia already has a nice light-weight windowing system - QWS. What's more (as 
I've mentioned already) I believe all windows can be rendered into texture 
memory and composited just like Compiz/Beryl. I'm currently trying to get Mesa 
Solo working so I can have a go at writing an OpenGL driver for Qtopia (For 
Samsung Q1 type devices really).


>I'm having some fun working directly with /dev/fb0
>and making sure I understand what I'm writing from the bottom up.

I too like to understand how everything works from the bottom up. :-) I guess 
that's another reason I liked Qtopia - because the documentation is just so 
good!
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Re: Screen shots of Qtopia on Neo and some thoughts

[John Locke]

Jeremy G wrote:
> I would be so disappointed if the OpenMoko devs gave up. 
Huh? I hadn't heard any indication anyone was thinking of doing so...

>  Don't get me
> wrong, I'm excited about Qtopia on the Neo, but I'm more interested in
> having options.  I'm the type of user who loves to play with distros
> on my computers; being able to swap mobile OSes from OpenMoko to
> Qtopia to Sun's Java-based OS and back again is a nerdy, wet dream.
>
>   
I for one am thrilled to have an actually working, open source phone,
and am finding the Qtopia distro to do that. I was actually showing
OpenMoko to a Windows tech head friend here on Sunday evening, and when
I saw him again this morning with the same Neo but using a completely
new OS, he was clearly starting to get interested. Especially when I
showed him the key/lock thingy.

But I also can't wait for the OpenMoko stuff to reach the point of
usability, and will most definitely install it again when it's more
stable (and probably a few times before then, too).

Two complete distributions you can install and run on the same hardware?
Both free? (not counting Sun since I can't get my paws on that one...)
That's the real revolution here, and I would say this proves Sean's
point of doing this in the first place...

Qtopia came just in time, too--my old phone pretty much died a couple
days ago--it works about half the time, cuts people off all the time
when I flip it open, and I was having to consider (shudder) buying
another phone since OpenMoko wasn't quite ready for day-to-day use.

-- 
John Locke
"Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems"
published by Charles River Media, June 2004
http://www.freelock.com


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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[thomas.cooksey]

>And there are already plans for someone to do the necessary XRender
>coding to support GTA02.

That's fantastic news! Why on earth did Harold say that the fact that an 
accelerated kdrive was being written couldn't be disclosed? What's the problem 
in telling the community? Not that it matters really. 

If OpenMoko's going for an XLib based theme engine, why bother with XRender? 
What else uses it other than Cairo? Surely xvideo would be a more useful 
extension to focus on?


>Because coding simple gradients is trivial and I've already done it :-)

Great, but soon people will want to do ever more complex vector graphics. 
Perhaps if/when XRender is accelerated, the switch could be made to cairo?


>All in all, the great thing about OpenMoko and the Neo1973 is that
>you're free to choose whatever path you wish to take. If you want to use
>Qtopia on your Neo1973 then you are more than welcome to do so! There
>are many many different Linux distributions and probably almost as many
>graphical user interface projects. One of the great things about the
>Free Software philosophy is choice and the Neo1973 is one of the first
>phones that gives you that ability to choose every single bit of
>software that you use on it.

Sure, and I'm not disputing the fact that you can run whatever you want is a 
good thing. I just wanted to clarify why development of OpenMoko was continuing 
given that there is now a more complete and mature alternetive and I think this 
has been answered:

1) Redundency is good, if Qtopia fails for some reason, there's an alternative.
2) A greater number existing applications can be ported easily to an X based 
framework. There is also presedent in the Maemo project of where this has been 
very useful.

I'd like to add a 3rd: Competition breeds innovation. :-)


Cheers,

Tom

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Re: Screen shots of Qtopia on Neo and some thoughts

[Jeremy G]

I would be so disappointed if the OpenMoko devs gave up.  Don't get me
wrong, I'm excited about Qtopia on the Neo, but I'm more interested in
having options.  I'm the type of user who loves to play with distros
on my computers; being able to swap mobile OSes from OpenMoko to
Qtopia to Sun's Java-based OS and back again is a nerdy, wet dream.

J.

On 9/19/07, Carlo E. Prelz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Subject: Screen shots of Qtopia on Neo and some thoughts
> Date: mer 19 set 07 07:39:14 +0200
>
> Quoting Krzysztof Kajkowski ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
>
> > Hi! I posted on my site: http://www.openmoko.org.pl some thoughs and
> > about 30 screen shots of what I think are the most interesting Qtopia
> > features.
>
> Thanks for posting them. Now I know I do not to want qtopia.
>
> I really hope Openmoko people do not give up on their software, or
> I'll have to look elsewhere for a substitute to my old treo.
>
> Carlo
>
> --
>   * Se la Strada e la sua Virtu' non fossero state messe da parte,
> * K * Carlo E. Prelz - [EMAIL PROTECTED] che bisogno ci sarebbe
>   *   di parlare tanto di amore e di rettitudine? (Chuang-Tzu)
>
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Neo 1973 certification in Russia (Rostest)

[fic]

I want to have Neo1973 in Russia. AFAIK there is a problem about
certification in Rostest. I can discover certification procedure and
prices from Rostest. I wrote following email at Rostest (in Russian):

Greetings

I have 3 questions about cellular phones certification:

Corean company FIC releases Neo 1973 smartphone:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page/ru

So:
Is it certified by Rostest?
How much certification will cost?
Which certification procedure you can offer?

Thanks, Anatoly

And i got answer:
Greetings, Anatoly

I need to know:
- Is you a manufacturer?
- Have you a contract with manufacturer and are you a reseller?
- Want you to import producion? How much amount?

Cost and procedure of certification depends of it.

Svetlana, Rostest

(my English is very average, sorry for mistakes)

Is anyone from manufacturers or team, who interested in certification Neo
1973 in Russia?
Can we acts cooperatively?


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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Shawn Rutledge]

On 9/19/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote (with
the wrong kind of word-wrap, unfortunately):

> X is client server architecture which uses sockets. The server draws things 
> on behalf of the clients. Rather than clients having to understand the X 
> protocol, Xlib was developed to provide a drawing API. XLib is a very limited 
> API for drawing lines, rectangles and arcs.

It covers a bit more - window allocation and manipulation, and
rendering text with bitmap fonts come to mind.

> XLib also allows clients to send a pixmap to the server to render. As time 
> went on, line rectangles and arcs became a bit limiting so toolkits like GTK 
> started rendering vector graphics into pixmaps and just used XLib to send 
> those pixmaps to the server. Copying pixmaps over sockets was slow so shared 
> memory was used instead for local clients.

That's about right.  I agree that it is very inelegant.

I think XRender does take advantage of whatever acceleration the X
driver implements.

> The GTA02 will have an SMedia grapgics accelerator. As it's not been 
> disclosed how the SMedia chip is going to be used, I have to guess and my 
> guess is that a KDrive server will be written which will accelerate block 
> fills and block copies.

I sure hope they do more than that.

If there is offscreen memory, bitmap glyphs for the fonts that you are
using can be cached, and copied onto onscreen memory without much
intervention from the CPU, so even with just accelerated blitting, you
get accelerated text too.  (And the bitmaps are rendered initially by
freetype, so by using bitmaps in the cache you don't lose smoothness.)

Next I would hope they would accelerate line-drawing, and fills of
some kinds of primitives (polygons, and/or rectangles, triangles).
Bonus points for antialiasing those (but I'm sure the chip can do it,
so it shouldn't be hard).

I'd like to see accelerated Bezier curves too, but not sure if that's possible.

For OpenGL probably the most important things would be textures mapped
onto triangles, and Gouraud-shaded triangles.  If you use Mesa in
mostly-software mode and just accelerate those, it's already a big
help for many kinds of rendering.

> On the other hand, we have Qtopia. In Qtopia, an application defines QT 
> Widgets, which are drawn using a QPaintEngine into an off-screen buffer then 
> copied to the frame buffer using a QScreen. Writing an accelerated graphics 
> driver is as simple as inheriting from QPaintEngine & QScreen and 
> re-implementing the methods the hardware has acceleration for and leaving the 
> other methods alone for software fallback. The process of writing an 
> accelerated driver is also very well documented with some great examples to 
> use.

Yep.  It's more direct, and I don't quite understand the argument that
X can be just as fast if you hack it in just the right ways.  There
are still more layers in an X-based architecture.  But X has other
advantages like being old and venerable, and network transparency
(which embedded devices often don't support anyway), choice of window
managers, and being able to run apps that don't use the toolkit you
happen to have chosen, or use XLib directly.  Plain XLib apps tend to
be amazingly tiny and wicked fast (just because their rendering is
simple by definition).

I think they are going to continue coexisting for a long time, and
it's fine with me if OpenMoko mainstream keeps using GTK and X
(because it works well enough), but personally I prefer working on
something new rather than depending on X and all its warts.  But
that's just me - I'm having some fun working directly with /dev/fb0
and making sure I understand what I'm writing from the bottom up.  I
hope it will be faster and take less memory.  I would also hope after
the docs come out, I can understand the chip well enough to accelerate
some operations.

I think for the ultimate in eye candy, using OpenGL pretty directly
with as few layers as possible between your OpenGL app and the
hardware would be the way to go.  (I'm pretty sure that's what Apple
does.)  But OpenGL doesn't do windowing, so you either have to write
some new windowing code or depend on X to manage that part, or just
run every app full-screen.  And almost every idea along these lines
has some sort of implementation out there somewhere already... like
Fresco, for example.

http://www.fresco.org/screenshots.html

Then again:  "Do not try this at home: This setup eats up the memory
of your Zaurus and it is so slow that you can hardly call it
interactive."  :-)

I haven't tried it myself.

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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Shawn Rutledge]

On 9/19/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> X does not however provide an OpenGL ES API, neither does GDK. Qtopia on
> the other hand does allow OpenGL ES integration.
...
> I suspect this is a moot point anyway as I doubt we'll ever see an OpenGL ES
> library/driver for the SMedia. I really hope I'm wrong about this

After the docs come out, it should be possible to write a Mesa driver
right?  My impression is OpenGL ES is just a subset of regular OpenGL;
it's not so different that Mesa APIs would not work.  Then the whole
X/GLX/Mesa/driver/DRI stack could be used.

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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Lorn Potter]

Thomas Wood wrote:

All in all, the great thing about OpenMoko and the Neo1973 is that
you're free to choose whatever path you wish to take. If you want to use
Qtopia on your Neo1973 then you are more than welcome to do so! There
are many many different Linux distributions and probably almost as many
graphical user interface projects. One of the great things about the
Free Software philosophy is choice and the Neo1973 is one of the first
phones that gives you that ability to choose every single bit of
software that you use on it.



This is exactly correct, and I agree. So does Trolltech.
viva la Neo!


--
Lorn 'ljp' Potter
Software Engineer, Systems Group, MES, Trolltech


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cheap international roaming/wi-fi calls

[Robin Paulson]

this company are launching a service for cheap roaming deals in
various countries around the world. interestingly they are also
offering voip using available wi-fi connections, similar to the
t-mobile hotspot, for 1.2 use cent a minutes. no word on seamless
hand-off between the two though

http://www.cubictelecom.com/faq/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/19/cubic_mobile_launch/

they sell a custom sim card which will work in any gsm/wi-fi phone,
presumaby including the neo, and also have a range of cheap gsm/wi-fi
phones

at the gsm rates i will save a heap on phone calls (in NZ), even more
when i get a wi-fi phone

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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Thomas Wood]

On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 20:57 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> [...] I mentioned earlier that cairo uses Xrender to copy & compose
> rasterized graphics onto the screen. Some graphics hardware can
> accelerate some of the XRender operations, however, in X.org it seems
> the current driver model makes that very difficult, resulting in
> limited acceleration and thus slowness (different drivers accelerate
> different XRender operations). To fix that, Glitz was created to allow
> cairo to render to a GL context and use the 3D hardware to accelerate
> the composition, sidestepping XRender completely.

And there are already plans for someone to do the necessary XRender
coding to support GTA02.

> 
> Lets look at OpenMoko's rendering path. Thomas Wood mentioned
> yesterday, OpenMoko currently uses a pixmap based theme engine. The
> pixmaps are (IMO) beautiful. They are all shiny and curved and have a
> nice orange-black gradient. While they look great, they are slow as
> the pixmaps need to be copied from off-screen buffers to the frame
> buffer. My guess is that's why the OpenMoko interface is a bit slugish
> (only a guess, I suspect others on this list know a lot more about
> this than I do!). Thomas mentioned yesterday that the new theme engine
> for OpenMoko used XLib (though GDK) rather than pixmaps or cairo.
> That's going to be much faster because there are no big copies
> involved. However, I don't understand how using XLib is going to
> produce the same graphical results. There's no facility for doing
> gradients or shadows or anything pretty? 

Because coding simple gradients is trivial and I've already done it :-)

The code for the Moko GTK+ engine is already available in SVN and once
it's more fully featured I will be posting screenshots on my blog.

All in all, the great thing about OpenMoko and the Neo1973 is that
you're free to choose whatever path you wish to take. If you want to use
Qtopia on your Neo1973 then you are more than welcome to do so! There
are many many different Linux distributions and probably almost as many
graphical user interface projects. One of the great things about the
Free Software philosophy is choice and the Neo1973 is one of the first
phones that gives you that ability to choose every single bit of
software that you use on it.


Regards,

Thomas


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Unit R Homesdale Business Center / 216-218 Homesdale Road /
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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[thomas.cooksey]

>X provides an OpenGL API.   So if you want to do fancy stuff like  
>Compiz, you do it with OpenGL.

X does not however provide an OpenGL ES API, neither does GDK. Qtopia on the 
other hand does allow OpenGL ES integration. In fact Beryl/Compiz-type effects 
and composition is already avaliable on Qtopia (acording to their documentation 
- no screen shots). To do that on KDrive you'd have to implement the XComposite 
extension and write a complete compositing manager which knows how to speak 
OpenGL ES. A massive task.

I suspect this is a moot point anyway as I doubt we'll ever see an OpenGL ES 
library/driver for the SMedia. I really hope I'm wrong about this as the visual 
effects which could be achieved would be amazing, way better than the iPhone.

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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Rod Whitby]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I've spent a lot of time trying to understand how Linux graphics
> stacks work. ... I will now try and explain how I understand it
> works and please, PLEASE correct me where I'm wrong! :-)

That is the most concise, clear and understandable explanation I have
ever seen about all these packages that keep slowing down the load-up
time of my shell or Emacs window in each new version of Linux ;-)

Thank you!

-- Rod

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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[thomas.cooksey]

>> >Firstly, Sato is not a mobile phone framework in any sense at all. It
>> >does not include any applications or services that would make a mobile
>> >phone useful. Sato is simply a visual style.
>> 
>> 
>> Strange, the description on http://www.pokylinux.org/ says:
>> 
>> "Sato is our experimental reference/example GTK+/Matchbox based 
>> PDA/smartphone like user interface environment aimed primarily at handheld 
>> devices with very high DPI VGA displays. It features a full suite of PIM 
>> applications, multimedia playback, web browsing, games and more."
>> 
>> Huh?? 

>"User interface environment" basically means the look and feel. It
>doesn't mean that it includes any sort of framework. It also says it is
>simply a PDA/smartphone *like* interface, not that it actually includes
>any usable phone software. I'll get this updated if it's causing
>confusion.

Yes, sorry, I mis-understood this. I'd get rid of the bit that says "It 
features a full suite of PIM applications, multimedia playback, web browsing, 
games and more." too if it doesn't actually contain any applications. ;-) 

I should have downloaded it and tried it out rather than assume things.
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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Thomas Wood]

On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 20:59 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >Firstly, Sato is not a mobile phone framework in any sense at all. It
> >does not include any applications or services that would make a mobile
> >phone useful. Sato is simply a visual style.
> 
> 
> Strange, the description on http://www.pokylinux.org/ says:
> 
> "Sato is our experimental reference/example GTK+/Matchbox based 
> PDA/smartphone like user interface environment aimed primarily at handheld 
> devices with very high DPI VGA displays. It features a full suite of PIM 
> applications, multimedia playback, web browsing, games and more."
> 
> Huh?? 

"User interface environment" basically means the look and feel. It
doesn't mean that it includes any sort of framework. It also says it is
simply a PDA/smartphone *like* interface, not that it actually includes
any usable phone software. I'll get this updated if it's causing
confusion.

Regards,

Thomas


-- 
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Unit R Homesdale Business Center / 216-218 Homesdale Road /
Bromley / BR1 2QZ / UK Tel: +44 (0)20 8819 6559

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Re: Screen shots of Qtopia on Neo and some thoughts

[Carlo E. Prelz]

Subject: Screen shots of Qtopia on Neo and some thoughts
Date: mer 19 set 07 07:39:14 +0200

Quoting Krzysztof Kajkowski ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):

> Hi! I posted on my site: http://www.openmoko.org.pl some thoughs and
> about 30 screen shots of what I think are the most interesting Qtopia
> features.

Thanks for posting them. Now I know I do not to want qtopia.

I really hope Openmoko people do not give up on their software, or
I'll have to look elsewhere for a substitute to my old treo.

Carlo

-- 
  * Se la Strada e la sua Virtu' non fossero state messe da parte,
* K * Carlo E. Prelz - [EMAIL PROTECTED] che bisogno ci sarebbe
  *   di parlare tanto di amore e di rettitudine? (Chuang-Tzu)

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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Ted Lemon]

X provides an OpenGL API.   So if you want to do fancy stuff like  
Compiz, you do it with OpenGL.


The main advantage to X over a direct-to-framebuffer system is that  
you can connect over the network.   X also has a well-though-out  
virtualization of the framebuffer, which is a wheel you'd have to  
reinvent for your fb system (although I guess OpenGL would do).


Personally I'm pretty agnostic about it - back in the day, X was a  
huge boon, but nowadays the ability to have a network-extensible  
windowing system isn't that important.   So the infrastructure X  
provides is valuable, but its raison-d'être is mostly a historical  
curiosity, as well as a security hole.



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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[thomas.cooksey]

>Firstly, Sato is not a mobile phone framework in any sense at all. It
>does not include any applications or services that would make a mobile
>phone useful. Sato is simply a visual style.


Strange, the description on http://www.pokylinux.org/ says:

"Sato is our experimental reference/example GTK+/Matchbox based PDA/smartphone 
like user interface environment aimed primarily at handheld devices with very 
high DPI VGA displays. It features a full suite of PIM applications, multimedia 
playback, web browsing, games and more."

Huh?? 

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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[thomas.cooksey]

>As long as X11 renders to FB, that's true. However, with the GPU in GTA02 that 
>may not be true at all as in fact, Mickey mentioned on IRC yesterday that fb 
>operations may well be *slower* on GTA02 than on GTA01.
>
>I don't know enough about the differences between Qt and Qtopia (aside of the 
>fact that Qtopia draws to the fb directly), but if Qtopia app scan run on Qt, 
>we might well end up seeing that on GTA02 as Qt/X11 will get the GPU 
>acceleration for "free"? At that point, GTK and Qt(opia) could happily 
>coexist like they do on the desktop.

What acceleration? You don't get hardware acceleration for free. Just because 
there's hardware there to accelerate drawing operations doesn't mean it gets 
used. I have raised this question several times:

> > What kind of driver are you planning on?  (I don't think I saw that
> > answered yet, sorry if I missed it)  KDrive, DRI, etc...
>
> We don't disclose this information yet, sorry.  As soon as there is
> something working, it will be in our subversion, though.

That reply came from Harold of all people. Surely it goes against the ideals of 
OpenMoko?

I guess the main reason I'm for a Qtopia based framework over a GTK+/X 
framework is the technology and the ease of accelerating drawing operations. 
I've spent a lot of time trying to understand how Linux graphics stacks work. 
Now, Qtopia seems highly integrated (and much simpler as a result). It is also 
exceptionally well documented thanks to doc.trolltech.com. X on the other hand 
seems mind-blowingly complicated and I have really struggled to understand how 
it works. Documentation is apauling and I can't even find any decent books on 
how it works. But, I will now try and explain how I understand it works and 
please, PLEASE correct me where I'm wrong! :-)

X is client server architecture which uses sockets. The server draws things on 
behalf of the clients. Rather than clients having to understand the X protocol, 
Xlib was developed to provide a drawing API. XLib is a very limited API for 
drawing lines, rectangles and arcs. XLib also allows clients to send a pixmap 
to the server to render. As time went on, line rectangles and arcs became a bit 
limiting so toolkits like GTK started rendering vector graphics into pixmaps 
and just used XLib to send those pixmaps to the server. Copying pixmaps over 
sockets was slow so shared memory was used instead for local clients. Pretty 
soon a more advanced vector graphics API was needed and so Cairo was born. 
Cairo rasterizes vector graphics into a client-side pixmap which is then drawn 
onto the screen using XRender, allowing compositing. Soon, people wanted 
anti-aliased, scaleable text, which XLib couldn't provide and so Pango was 
born. Pango uses Cairo to render text allowing both vector graphics and text to 
appear together. Pango, Cairo & XLib are wrapped up in the GDK (The API of 
which is pretty well documented at 
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gdk/index.html). GTK+ widgets are rendered using 
a theme engine, which uses the GDK to render widgets. I.e. An application 
defines a widget, a theme engine draws that widget via GDK. That could be 
rendered using GDK's wrappers for XLib or cairo (typically cairo for desktops).

So that's how I understand GTK/Cairo/Pango/X hangs together, but as I said 
before others know far more than I do. ;-)

Now, given that is how the graphics stack hangs together, where do you off-load 
operations to hardware? What operations _can_ you off load to hardware? From 
what I've read, the most computationally expensive operations are ones which 
involve accessing large blocks of memory, e.g. block fills & block copies. 
These typically can be performed by hardware. So, when you drag a window round 
the screen, hardware can be used to copy the window to it's new location. Block 
fills & block copies are the only operations (other than cursors) most hardware 
accelerated x servers implement, which is fine, because that's where most of 
the work is. I mentioned earlier that cairo uses Xrender to copy & compose 
rasterized graphics onto the screen. Some graphics hardware can accelerate some 
of the XRender operations, however, in X.org it seems the current driver model 
makes that very difficult, resulting in limited acceleration and thus slowness 
(different drivers accelerate different XRender operations). To fix that, Glitz 
was created to allow cairo to render to a GL context and use the 3D hardware to 
accelerate the composition, sidestepping XRender completely.

Lets look at OpenMoko's rendering path. Thomas Wood mentioned yesterday, 
OpenMoko currently uses a pixmap based theme engine. The pixmaps are (IMO) 
beautiful. They are all shiny and curved and have a nice orange-black gradient. 
While they look great, they are slow as the pixmaps need to be copied from 
off-screen buffers to the frame buffer. My guess is that's why the OpenMoko 
interface is a bit slugish (only a guess, I suspect others on this list know a 

Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Lorn Potter]

Gabriel Ambuehl wrote:

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 22:58:00 Lorn Potter wrote:

Not X11 like all other systems. This has better performance and is in my
eyes the perfect solution for embedded devices.

There is no great performance difference between x11 and fb.

As long as X11 renders to FB, that's true. However, with the GPU in GTA02 that 
may not be true at all as in fact, Mickey mentioned on IRC yesterday that fb 
operations may well be *slower* on GTA02 than on GTA01.


For unaccelerated framebuffer vs. accelerated X11, yes. But we are 
planning on using those accel chips too.





I don't know enough about the differences between Qt and Qtopia (aside of the 
fact that Qtopia draws to the fb directly), but if Qtopia app scan run on Qt, 
we might well end up seeing that on GTA02 as Qt/X11 will get the GPU 
acceleration for "free"? At that point, GTK and Qt(opia) could happily 
coexist like they do on the desktop.




--
Lorn 'ljp' Potter
Software Engineer, Systems Group, MES, Trolltech

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Screen shots of Qtopia on Neo and some thoughts

[Krzysztof Kajkowski]

Hi! I posted on my site: http://www.openmoko.org.pl some thoughs and
about 30 screen shots of what I think are the most interesting Qtopia
features.

I'd recommend anyone who has a phone to give Qtopia a try because it
is very mature and nicely made piece of software. Anyone else may
visit http://www.openmoko.org.pl/node/57 and start saving pocket money
for his/her Neo1973 :)

cheers

cayco

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Anyone going to Ohio Linux Fest?

[Patrick Davila]

Anyone planning on attending the upcoming Ohio Linux Fest (Sept 28-30) in
Columbus? If so, please come by and say hello at our table. I'm really
interested in seeing a Neo1973 in person if anyone has one. Also, don't
forget to come to the pre-convention party at Barley's Brew House on
Friday night.
Thanks and keep up the good work

Pat

-- 
http://tllts.org/ - The Linux Link Tech Show
http://pdavila.homelinux.org:8080/blog/ - My blog







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Re: [-SPAM-] Re: application idea

[Casey Harkins]

David Pottage wrote:

On Wed, September 19, 2007 12:00 pm, Ian Stirling wrote:

ian douglas wrote:

Tilman Baumann wrote:
I've seen it at another contract I worked a year ago, but not sure if
the GPS-to-US-zip-code data was freely available or a paid service. The
database I used for my job there had the entire US postal code regions
mapped out based on latitude/longitude so the data IS out there. Just a
matter of seeing if it's free to download from somewhere. The database
was gigantic though, I'm not sure it's something you'd want to store on
the device itself.

Going to the 5 digit zips is easy - it's well under a meg.
5 digit + 4 is a whole different matter.


But is the data freely available, or is it constrained by copyright or the
like.



There is public domain data for 5 digit zips in the US.
   http://zips.sourceforge.net

-casey

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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Joshua Layne]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


This is something someone else touched on. If you're writing an application, 
abstract all the complicated stuff away from the UI code, then you can make 
whatever kind of UI you want. NetworkManager I think is a perfect example of this. 
It would be good to have a defined interface to access PIM info, make calls etc. I 
believe LiPS has been set up to do just that. So perhaps it would be better to make 
moth OpenMoko & Qtopia PE LiPS complient. I heard that the LiPS forum hired a 
load of GPE PE developers to develop a reference implementation. It might be worth 
looking at GPE PE and lifting some of the standardised bits. I don't know, perhaps 
this is happening already?
I asked this question on the G(PE)^2 listserv - both projects started 
very close in time to each other, have different backing and slightly 
different goals, but there is reasonable overlap and it is my 
understanding from one of the core G(PE)^2 members that they are working 
with the openmoko team to collaborate as much as possible.  I don't 
really have any detail beyond that.


Rgds,
j.

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Re: [-SPAM-] Re: application idea

[andy]

Just wondering if there is a reason for the [-SPAM-] in the subject line?

Andy

On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:11:30 GMT, Giles Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> David Pottage <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote :
> 
>> But is the data freely available, or is it constrained by copyright or
> the
>> like.
>>
>> In the UK, postcode (zipcode) data is restricted by copyright, and the
>> post office makes money selling licenses to users. Even if we could get
>> the data, we could not freely distribute it.
> 
> I'm not particularly bothered about free solutions to making sat nav work
> on the Neo. If someone can make the Tomtom map data and postcode file work
> on the Neo it would be good. It's not that expensive to get a licence for
> these day.
> 
> ---
> G O Jones
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Re: [-SPAM-] Re: application idea

[Giles Jones]

David Pottage <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote :

> But is the data freely available, or is it constrained by copyright or the
> like.
> 
> In the UK, postcode (zipcode) data is restricted by copyright, and the
> post office makes money selling licenses to users. Even if we could get
> the data, we could not freely distribute it.

I'm not particularly bothered about free solutions to making sat nav work on 
the Neo. If someone can make the Tomtom map data and postcode file work on the 
Neo it would be good. It's not that expensive to get a licence for these day.

---
G O Jones





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Re: OM Camera - a new angle

[Ian Stirling]

Gabriel Ambuehl wrote:

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 20:12:04 Ian Stirling wrote:


I'd want several megapixels, ability to take at least several second
pictures, for use around dusk.
Optical zoom would be a big plus.
LCD size not hugely important.
Wifi and bluetooth would be a big plus.
USB-host too, to enable printing directly to devices, or offloading a
few pictures to someones memory card.

Have you seen the price of decent wifi enabled network cams?



For my uses, a cheap one would be plenty, but I don't want it to be a security 
hole in my network...  Ideally it could do [EMAIL PROTECTED]@30fps, too. I can do 
without the Bluetooth.


If it was a digital pocket cam rather than a cheap network cam, I definitely 
want optical finder, optical 3x (or more) zoom with decent optics, at least 6 
megapixels and very short time from hitting button to actually making picture 
(the delay disturbs me rather badly on my trusty old Powershot).



I was more meaning a pocket cam that could also be stuck on a mount as a 
network cam.


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Re: [-SPAM-] Re: application idea

[David Pottage]

On Wed, September 19, 2007 12:00 pm, Ian Stirling wrote:
> ian douglas wrote:
>> Tilman Baumann wrote:
>>
>>> The biggest challenge would be a mapping from gps coordinates to
>>> regions/postcodes or such.
>>> If you have this information, you could do all sorts of crazy stuff.
>>> But i doubt these data would be very easy to get.
>>
>>
>> I've seen it at another contract I worked a year ago, but not sure if
>> the GPS-to-US-zip-code data was freely available or a paid service. The
>> database I used for my job there had the entire US postal code regions
>> mapped out based on latitude/longitude so the data IS out there. Just a
>> matter of seeing if it's free to download from somewhere. The database
>> was gigantic though, I'm not sure it's something you'd want to store on
>> the device itself.
>
> Going to the 5 digit zips is easy - it's well under a meg.
> 5 digit + 4 is a whole different matter.

But is the data freely available, or is it constrained by copyright or the
like.

In the UK, postcode (zipcode) data is restricted by copyright, and the
post office makes money selling licenses to users. Even if we could get
the data, we could not freely distribute it.

In the UK there is a project [1] to build a post code database using user
contributed information. Basicaly users are asked to type in the postocode
and location of their homes, busneses, and any other site they can find.
We many have to use similar database for other countries.

[1] http://www.freethepostcode.org/

-- 
David Pottage

Error compiling committee.c To many arguments to function.


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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Thomas Wood]

On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 14:03 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
[...]
> 
> This is something someone else touched on. If you're writing an
> application, abstract all the complicated stuff away from the UI code,
> then you can make whatever kind of UI you want. NetworkManager I think
> is a perfect example of this. It would be good to have a defined
> interface to access PIM info, make calls etc. I believe LiPS has been
> set up to do just that. So perhaps it would be better to make moth
> OpenMoko & Qtopia PE LiPS complient. I heard that the LiPS forum hired
> a load of GPE PE developers to develop a reference implementation. It
> might be worth looking at GPE PE and lifting some of the standardised
> bits. I don't know, perhaps this is happening already?

With regards to the contacts and calendar applications in OpenMoko, they
use Evolution Data Server to store their data, in the same way Evolution
does on the desktop. In turn, this stores the data in the vCard and iCal
formats, which are industry standard.


> 
> One more thing on duplication of effort... It's nice to see OpenHand
> developers working on OpenMoko, are there any plans to merge Sato into
> OpenMoko? There's currently 4 GTK+ mobile phone frameworks I know of
> (GPE PE, Sato, OpenMoko & Hiker). Surely no one can claim that much
> duplicated effort is a good thing? I can see the argument for
> KDE/Gnome, GTK+/QT, but not 4 projects all relying on the same
> technology all doing exactly the same thing.

Firstly, Sato is not a mobile phone framework in any sense at all. It
does not include any applications or services that would make a mobile
phone useful. Sato is simply a visual style.

Secondly, the OpenMoko framework is different from projects such as
Hiker because it only contains functions and classes that actually give
benefit to the user and developer, rather than wrapping existing
technologies for the sake of it. This means OpenMoko contains much less
overhead than other frameworks and allows developers greater
flexibility.

Regards,

Thomas

-- 
OpenedHand Ltd.

Unit R Homesdale Business Center / 216-218 Homesdale Road /
Bromley / BR1 2QZ / UK Tel: +44 (0)20 8819 6559

Expert Open Source For Consumer Devices - http://o-hand.com/



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RE: Reminder: OpenExpo Switzerland

[Oliver]

If you can, please film it and put it up on google video or via a torrent!

The community craves video talks!

/Oliver
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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Ian Darwin]

On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 20:40 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Would you really say either gnome or is wasted effort and should be 
discontinued? Or vim/gnome,linux/bsd,gecko/webkit/mysql/postgres...


Yes, it's my personal belief that these projects all represent wasted effort 
>>and that if they cooperated they'd achieve more. I always get a nice 
warm
>>fuzzy feeling whenever I see a forked project merge (Compiz Fusion, 
Webkit/KHTML)


Maybe you should let Microsoft buy them all out and then there'd only be 
one way. :-) If that's not what you want, "be careful what you wish for".


Alternately, if you were appointed tzar for a day, do you believe you 
have sufficient wisdom to decide which one has the "right" approach?


"Choice is good."

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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

Calls for more collaboration are quite common, but I can't help but feel
that people assume it is easier than it actually is. There is the GMAE
effort which tries do achieve exactly what is mentioned here, which is
further codesharing between all these efforts. 

Whats holding up collaboration is rarely ever ill will or lack of seeing
how collaboration is useful. I mean these people choose existing open
source technologies just because they could see such benefits. But in
reality a lot of issues makes it a slow process, like internal time
constraints, disputes about code quality, licensing challenges,
disagreement about technology choices and so on. 

For instance I wouldn't be surprised if OpenMoko face the challenge of
needing most of their components to be LGPL/BSD licensed instead of GPL,
which puts a lot of code out of their reach. Cause even if the OpenMoko
phones will be shipping with all free software there might be further
stuff getting integrated downstream for which a demand for GPL licensing
would be unacceptable. Like Vodafone or some other network operator
putting some branded special software on phones distributed through them
as one example.

Another good example is that a 'competing' project might have a piece of
code which supposedly do what you need, but your engineers when looking
at it decides that its coded in a shoddy fashion and thus will risk
getting your project bogged down in trying to bugfix it. Or the code is
Java based and your platform doesn't ship with Java etc.

So please be aware that 'duplication' of effort isn't just because
people are stupid or selfcentered, its often happens due slightly
different needs or things which can't be easily publicized. 

So as someone who have been to multiple GMAE meetings I know that people
like OpenMoko, Maemo, Sato, Hiker and so on are trying to increase code
sharing, but it does take time.

Christian
 
> 
> This is something someone else touched on. If you're writing an application, 
> abstract all the complicated stuff away from the UI code, then you can make 
> whatever kind of UI you want. NetworkManager I think is a perfect example of 
> this. It would be good to have a defined interface to access PIM info, make 
> calls etc. I believe LiPS has been set up to do just that. So perhaps it 
> would be better to make moth OpenMoko & Qtopia PE LiPS complient. I heard 
> that the LiPS forum hired a load of GPE PE developers to develop a reference 
> implementation. It might be worth looking at GPE PE and lifting some of the 
> standardised bits. I don't know, perhaps this is happening already?
> 
> One more thing on duplication of effort... It's nice to see OpenHand 
> developers working on OpenMoko, are there any plans to merge Sato into 
> OpenMoko? There's currently 4 GTK+ mobile phone frameworks I know of (GPE PE, 
> Sato, OpenMoko & Hiker). Surely no one can claim that much duplicated effort 
> is a good thing? I can see the argument for KDE/Gnome, GTK+/QT, but not 4 
> projects all relying on the same technology all doing exactly the same thing.
> 
> 
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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 22:58:00 Lorn Potter wrote:
> > Not X11 like all other systems. This has better performance and is in my
> > eyes the perfect solution for embedded devices.
> There is no great performance difference between x11 and fb.
>
As long as X11 renders to FB, that's true. However, with the GPU in GTA02 that 
may not be true at all as in fact, Mickey mentioned on IRC yesterday that fb 
operations may well be *slower* on GTA02 than on GTA01.

I don't know enough about the differences between Qt and Qtopia (aside of the 
fact that Qtopia draws to the fb directly), but if Qtopia app scan run on Qt, 
we might well end up seeing that on GTA02 as Qt/X11 will get the GPU 
acceleration for "free"? At that point, GTK and Qt(opia) could happily 
coexist like they do on the desktop.




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Re: OM Camera - a new angle

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 20:12:04 Ian Stirling wrote:
> I'd want several megapixels, ability to take at least several second
> pictures, for use around dusk.
> Optical zoom would be a big plus.
> LCD size not hugely important.
> Wifi and bluetooth would be a big plus.
> USB-host too, to enable printing directly to devices, or offloading a
> few pictures to someones memory card.
>
> Have you seen the price of decent wifi enabled network cams?

For my uses, a cheap one would be plenty, but I don't want it to be a security 
hole in my network...  Ideally it could do [EMAIL PROTECTED]@30fps, too. I can 
do 
without the Bluetooth.

If it was a digital pocket cam rather than a cheap network cam, I definitely 
want optical finder, optical 3x (or more) zoom with decent optics, at least 6 
megapixels and very short time from hitting button to actually making picture 
(the delay disturbs me rather badly on my trusty old Powershot).

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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[thomas.cooksey]

>My thoughts that competition has it's advantages and both of the
>technologies will find their fans. But Trolltech and Openmoko should
>cooperate with each other first of all in terms of integration of PIM
>data. Do you really need dual-booting (or other possibility to start
>either Qtopia or Openmoko) without possibility to synchronize address book
>etc between them? Of course, the best case from my point of view is to
>have the same low-level infrastructure (I mean API's to GSM-part, to
>PIM-part, etc.) for both Qtopia and Openmoko, but differ in the GUI part.
>But it is too late to talk about this as I can see :).

This is something someone else touched on. If you're writing an application, 
abstract all the complicated stuff away from the UI code, then you can make 
whatever kind of UI you want. NetworkManager I think is a perfect example of 
this. It would be good to have a defined interface to access PIM info, make 
calls etc. I believe LiPS has been set up to do just that. So perhaps it would 
be better to make moth OpenMoko & Qtopia PE LiPS complient. I heard that the 
LiPS forum hired a load of GPE PE developers to develop a reference 
implementation. It might be worth looking at GPE PE and lifting some of the 
standardised bits. I don't know, perhaps this is happening already?

One more thing on duplication of effort... It's nice to see OpenHand developers 
working on OpenMoko, are there any plans to merge Sato into OpenMoko? There's 
currently 4 GTK+ mobile phone frameworks I know of (GPE PE, Sato, OpenMoko & 
Hiker). Surely no one can claim that much duplicated effort is a good thing? I 
can see the argument for KDE/Gnome, GTK+/QT, but not 4 projects all relying on 
the same technology all doing exactly the same thing.


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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Victor Chernyshev]

Thomas Wood wrote:

  On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 20:40 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  
  

  Would you really say either gnome or is wasted effort and should be 
discontinued? Or vim/gnome,linux/bsd,gecko/webkit/mysql/postgres...
  

Yes, it's my personal belief that these projects all represent wasted effort and that if they cooperated they'd achieve more. I always get a nice warm fuzzy feeling whenever I see a forked project merge (Compiz Fusion, Webkit/KHTML)

  
  

You don't think competition has it's advantages? A bigger project
doesn't necessarily equal better results. There are significant
differences between (for example) KDE and GNOME that make it useful to
have a choice. They are tackling the same problem but in different ways.
It is very important people can experiment and try different things.
Anything else would be to stifle innovation and progress.

Regards,

Thomas


  


My thoughts that competition has it's advantages and both of the
technologies will find their fans. But Trolltech and Openmoko should
cooperate with each other first of all in terms of integration of PIM
data. Do you really need dual-booting (or other possibility to start
either Qtopia or Openmoko) without possibility to synchronize address
book etc between them? Of course, the best case from my point of view
is to have the same low-level infrastructure (I mean API's to GSM-part,
to PIM-part, etc.) for both Qtopia and Openmoko, but differ in the GUI
part. But it is too late to talk about this as I can see :).

Anyway, I'm glad to have a possibility to choose an open software for
Neo

VC.



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Reminder: OpenExpo Switzerland

[Esra Kummer]

Hi

Tomorrow will Micahel Lauer from the OpenMoko Team at the OpenExpo in 
Zürich (Switzerland) speak about the project. You need a Ticket (it's 
free). It's at 11 am.


http://www.openexpo.ch/openexpo-2007-zuerich/


Hope to see some of you there

Cheers
Esra

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Re: dialer suggestion

[ramsesoriginal]

Ok, as i already said some times, i think the best would be to have a single
app that would allow a simple templating. It could go from some in-deep
"template=app"-system, where the numbers are sned through dbus, to a simple
webkit-based(if we already have it, why dont use it?)
javascript&css-solution. Or something similar to the superkaramba-applets.
Doesn't matter how it would be implemented, but such a skinning engime would
be great!

On 9/17/07, Ryan Prior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I think that would be awesome... that's all have to add, though. If
> anybody wants to make a fun cosmetic change to the Dialer, this could be a
> really cool one!
>
> On 9/17/07, Joshua Layne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > kinda tongue-in-cheek, but...
> > so kinetic scrolling works now
> > and all the 'dialer' does is capture numbers to send to the GSM chip.
> > what about an old-school dialer?  OK, maybe 'retro' is a better name at
> > this point.
> >
> > ROTARY baby!
> >
> > kitsch.  flare.  nobodyelsehasit.
> >
> > (maybe there is a reason for that last one)
> >
> > I dunno - crazy idea, but it could look really cool - " what the H are
> > you doing?" - "I'm dialing my cell phone, jeez"
> >
> > I have no photoshop skillz, so all I can tell you is: find an old rotary
> > dial phone - make it look like that. - like a virtual of these:
> > http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/06/portable_rotary.html (just
> > the dialer)
> >
> > priority (1 is high): 99 or 999
> >
> > it's at least as important as TV.
> >
> > ___
> > OpenMoko community mailing list
> > community@lists.openmoko.org
> > http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
> >
>
>
> ___
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>


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Re: [-SPAM-] Re: application idea

[Ian Stirling]

ian douglas wrote:

Tilman Baumann wrote:

The biggest challenge would be a mapping from gps coordinates to 
regions/postcodes or such.
If you have this information, you could do all sorts of crazy stuff. 
But i doubt these data would be very easy to get.



I've seen it at another contract I worked a year ago, but not sure if 
the GPS-to-US-zip-code data was freely available or a paid service. The 
database I used for my job there had the entire US postal code regions 
mapped out based on latitude/longitude so the data IS out there. Just a 
matter of seeing if it's free to download from somewhere. The database 
was gigantic though, I'm not sure it's something you'd want to store on 
the device itself.


Going to the 5 digit zips is easy - it's well under a meg.
5 digit + 4 is a whole different matter.


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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

On Wednesday 19 September 2007 10:28:55 Jonathan Spooner wrote:
> I didn't realise Qtopia was */proprietary/*

It's no longer, it's fully GPL now.

>  comments on preferring QT for the quality docs and IDE.  I'd rather
> plug away at developing in GTK than that.

Well if you want X11, Qt should run on the Neo just fine...



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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Attila Csipa]

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 18:00:51 Giles Jones wrote:
> Typically the argument for QT is ease of programming, there's a good IDE
> called KDevelop. GTK's argument typically is that it's GPL and faster.

Except Qt nowadays actually is GPL (GTK+ being only LGPL), to be more 
precise :)

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Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Jonathan Spooner]

Thomas Wood wrote:

On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 20:40 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  
Would you really say either gnome or is wasted effort and should be 
discontinued? Or vim/gnome,linux/bsd,gecko/webkit/mysql/postgres...
  

Yes, it's my personal belief that these projects all represent wasted effort 
and that if they cooperated they'd achieve more. I always get a nice warm fuzzy 
feeling whenever I see a forked project merge (Compiz Fusion, Webkit/KHTML)




You don't think competition has it's advantages? A bigger project
doesn't necessarily equal better results. There are significant
differences between (for example) KDE and GNOME that make it useful to
have a choice. They are tackling the same problem but in different ways.
It is very important people can experiment and try different things.
Anything else would be to stifle innovation and progress.

Regards,

Thomas


  
I didn't realise Qtopia was */proprietary/* 
   
IE no X server.  Given that I retract my earlier comments on preferring 
QT for the quality docs and IDE.  I'd rather plug away at developing 
in GTK than that.


--
Jonathan Spooner
Nationwilcox Systems Ltd
Tel: 0121 3544345


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RE: Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Thomas Wood]

On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 20:40 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >Would you really say either gnome or is wasted effort and should be 
> >discontinued? Or vim/gnome,linux/bsd,gecko/webkit/mysql/postgres...
> 
> Yes, it's my personal belief that these projects all represent wasted effort 
> and that if they cooperated they'd achieve more. I always get a nice warm 
> fuzzy feeling whenever I see a forked project merge (Compiz Fusion, 
> Webkit/KHTML)


You don't think competition has it's advantages? A bigger project
doesn't necessarily equal better results. There are significant
differences between (for example) KDE and GNOME that make it useful to
have a choice. They are tackling the same problem but in different ways.
It is very important people can experiment and try different things.
Anything else would be to stifle innovation and progress.

Regards,

Thomas


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Unit R Homesdale Business Center / 216-218 Homesdale Road /
Bromley / BR1 2QZ / UK Tel: +44 (0)20 8819 6559

Expert Open Source For Consumer Devices - http://o-hand.com/



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