QActivity

[Bernhard Rosenkraenzer]

Hi,
sorry for the delay, net access here is pretty far from reliable (it's
pretty common for the entire country's net access to just drop and stay
down for a couple of days - nobody but me seems to be bothered by it).

> Qt used to be my favorite GUI toolkit... but I've not been doing
> GUI programming for a long time.

Much the same here -- Qt is by far the best (even though some fairly
unknown libraries are pretty good as well - if you have spare time, check
out http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ -- it's not quite as good as Qt, but it
beats the **** out of the likes of GTK), but I haven't had much time to
spend on GUI programming either, too much other work like adapting stuff to
run on OLPCs or Intel Classmates.

> I'd lile to help you out, but my time is very limited as
> we're already overwhelmed by urgent development tasks.

Same here - that's why it'll take some time before the advanced features
make it in.

> I'm available 24/7 on Freenode, channel #olpc for any question.
> The #sugar channel is also an important source of information for
> a project like yours.

I'll be there when I get back home - from here, connecting to IRC is a real
nightmare (the connection drops about once in 10 minutes).

> I'm in contact with another developer porting C# and Mono
> applications to the XO.  He's now working to suppor the journal.
> There may be some overlap of questions and problems, but probably
> no code to share.

There might even be some code to share, the D-Bus interfaces in C# and Qt
are not entirely dissimilar.

>> The next step (without getting the mesh stuff up) is making the
>> kdeedu apps work - unfortunately running full-fledged KDE apps
>> while that sugar memory hog is running as well turns out to be a
>> bit of a problem at least on B2 boxes...
> 
> We do not support the B2 boxes any more, due to lack of developer
> time for testing and bugfixing.  So the latest builds do not
> actually even boot on B2s!

I know -- but all I have is a B2 (and one of the old ones at that, 128 MB).

>> I'm almost inclined to write an embedded desktop with a  focus on
>> just leaving all available memory to applications...
> 
> Some time ago I played with Konqueror Embedded, which was basically
> a port of Konqueror and kdelibs to Qt Embedded.  So you could
> configure kdelibs in this reduced mode, by stripping away desktop
> features such as printing, the file dialog, etc.

Yes, but that isn't done for KDE4 yet, and developing for KDE3 is a dead
end -- the kdeedu applications in KDE4 SVN are already much better than
their KDE3 counterparts (I have almost all of them running by now btw).
marble currently requires an ugly hack to run because of memory
constraints, but after that, even that works quite nicely.

> If some of this project is still functional, it would be a good
> start.  If not, Qtopia is already close to what you need, maybe.

Yes, the problem with Qtopia in this case is that it's not X11 based, and
therefore can't run the standard OLPC applications - but it might be
interesting for an alternative distribution that runs kdeedu stuff only.

> Will you be targeting kde3 or kde4, btw?

kde4 -- kde3 is a dead end and its d-bus support is a bit of a kludge.

> (PS: let's Cc the devel@ mailing list, so other people can read
> our discussion and maybe provide feedback)

done