Qtopia vs ASU

Ken Restivo ken at restivo.org
Fri Jul 25 20:36:41 CEST 2008


On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 04:16:08AM +1000, Lorn Potter wrote:
> Aaron Sowry wrote:
> > At the risk of sounding completely ignorant, what is the difference 
> > between the 'Qtopia' images and the ASU images? Are the Qtopia images 
> > open-source?
> > 
> 
> ASU is the hybrid ELF/ with parts from Qtopia running on X11 environment 
> that Openmoko is developing.
> 
> Qtopia is the phone gui that is developed by Trolltech, a Nokia Company.
> 
> Qtopia is open source and released under the GPL.
> 

I think the question was: what's the difference between the Qtopia *images* and the ASU images.

IIRC, the ASU images use X, even the Qtopia apps on the ASU image use X, but the Qtopia images do not have X, so the apps on the Qtopia image write directly to a framebuffer. So the ASU is OpenMoko's port of Trolltech's Qtopia, to run on X.

Apps on the pure-Qtopia image have to be specially written in order to run on the Qtopia image, to deal with the frame buffer. I'd also guess that'd mean that the apps are faster, since X performs like an arthritic snail.

I'm not sure where the Qtopia image comes from either. Does it come from Trolltech? The ASU image comes from OpenMoko.

Because the ASU uses X, then all kinds of other apps using other toolkits (Gnome, ETK, etc.) can co-exist beside the Qtopia apps on the ASU image.

Example: I'm using the openmoko-terminal2 (which appears to be GTK), on ASU, alongside the excellent Qtopia apps.

There's this too: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Distributions

-ken




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