[Gllug] PDAs

[Pete Ryland]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 08:08:23PM +0000, Matthew Allum wrote:
> on Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 02:22:06PM +0000, Tethys wrote:
> > - No native ssh client that I can find. Rumour has it that there's a
> > Java one available. But failing that, the only option is to replace
> > Windows with Linux. As you might imagine, I'm mortified at the thought
> > :-)
> 
> Its easy nowadays, no risk involved - you can flash strait from a cf card,
> even have it dualboot with PocketPC....  And you then have the choice of X
> based GPE or the 'more free' version of qtopia - Opie environments. Both
> are built on the 'familiar' distro base which is basically a slimmed down
> debian. This is where zaurus 'borrowed' things like its packaging system
> from and where qtopia was developed on.

I always thought Qtopia was around before familiar, so I asked a developer
at Trolltech:

----- Forwarded message -----

Not sure about the exact timing of specifically familiar, but we did develop 
with ipaqs running linux which we got from handhelds.org (ie the work done at 
digital -> compaq's labs). We usually never bothered installing X on the 
ipaqs.

What they might also be refering to is the ipkg packaging system. An ipkg is 
just a tar.gz file which has had the extension renamed to .ipk !
It contains data files and control files much like .deb files from what I 
understand is where the idea was borrowed from. We use ipkg because it is 
simple and small to install on a device and is what handhelds.org were using 
for linux on ipaqs which is one of the first devices we started developing 
Qtopia on, (although we also had QPE on Cassiopieas before that and some 
other test board). BTW ipkg is basically just a shell script which extracts 
the .ipk package file, extracts the data to the root directory and then 
extracts the control data files to somewhere else. There's a bit more to it 
than that.

As far as Opie being more free than Qtopia, I can't see how that is so. Opie 
is a derived work from Qtopia, they essentially copied Qtopia and hacked on 
it basically changing anywhere that says Qtopia to say Opie, any Qs to Os 
etc. 

Also don't know about X being more free. Qt/Embedded and Qtopia on top of 
Linux can be licensed as GPL through out. Most X implementations that I am 
aware of aren't GPL, usually some special X license thing which technically 
may or may not be GPL compatible due to advertising clauses or other crap. 
Because you can license Qtopia as GPL, Qt/Embedded as GPL, then I don't thnik 
it gets better than that.

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Pete Ryland
http://pdr.cx/

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