[haiku-development] Re: Haiku, Qt and apps, oh my!

  • From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:25:45 -0400

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Jason Todd Slack-Moehrle
<mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Maybe I am weird, but I was reminiscing the other day about BeOS R3 and R4
> and the things that I was doing then. I took out a loan from a local bank
> for $2,000 USD to buy a BeBox. I was studying C++ at a local community
> school and I had ideas for software that would change the world! There were
> good software packages available like PE and Post Master. Young and naive, I
> was, but I have never lost that fire and desire.

I don't think you are alone in having nostalgia for BeOS and the days
when Be, Inc. was still around. I was looking fondly at my various Be
install disks the other day. All sent for free because I signed up as
a developer. I never did write a Be application back then, which I
still regret, but I try to make up for that by working on Haiku and
soon this new native web browser that I talk about constantly :)

> 1. Since Qt (by Trolltech/Nokia) is now LGPL, what about a port of Qt to run
> on Haiku? I thought about this a while ago. Would it be beneficial? I could
> take on this task.

In my opinion porting such widget frameworks is just an invitation for
a bunch of sub-par ports of Linux software. I don't want to see Haiku
become the equivalent of another Linux distro. Therefore I think it is
better to have native apps, and ports should only be used to tide us
over. I think one of the major problems with Linux is having too many
options and therefore no consistency. The whole GTK/Qt/Motif/etc GUI
thing is just one example of many.

> 2. I wish there was a way to use Haiku to cross-compile Windows and OS X
> apps so I could just use Haiku for development but still produce apps for
> the other platforms.

Anything is possible but it seems like you would need a lot of
infrastructure for this to work. We have the latest GCC which I am
sure can compile Windows and OS X applications, but there is still the
issue of all the headers and libraries you would need, including many
that I am sure are proprietary on each system. You would still need to
test those apps though, which certainly requires some form of those
operating systems to test on (even if just in VM software.)

> 3. Is there TCL/TK for Haiku?

It was ported to BeOS so should certainly be portable to Haiku. In
fact in general Haiku is easier to port to than BeOS was.

> 4. What is the best e-mail client now? Post Master was my favorite. maybe I
> could get Post master going again....

I am a Gmail user so just need a modern browser, but I believe a lot
of the Haiku developers use Beam or just good ol' Mail.

> 5. I have a new Lenovo S10 netbook, 320gb, 2.5gb RAM. I am wondering how
> Haiku would run on this! Has anybody tried?

From what I have seen Thinkpads and Lenovos have generally been good
machines to run Haiku on. The machine I am on is a ThinkPad that is a
few years old and it seems to run Haiku pretty well, though I have not
used it extensively (which should change soon.) You can always put
Haiku on a USB stick and try to boot it up and see how it works on
that machine.

Regards,
Ryan

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