Re: Install Opie

Jonathan Wilson wrote:
> Where'd everybody go?

IIRC, most of the former developers got frustrated with Trolltech's
openness or lack thereof in the development of Qtopia - which is pretty
much why Opie was founded in the first place, as far as I can tell. This
was before the release of Qtopia 4 as open source.

Opie is at the moment based on Qt 2.x and Qtopia 1.x, and the code base is
certainly getting on in years. That doesn't mean it's not usable, but
working with an older platform doesn't make attracting new developers
easy. There is one major effort to modernise Opie (known as OpieII) but it
seems to have fallen by the wayside due to lack of time.

> I've always looked at OPIE as "KDE for my iPaq". Has everyone moved to
> some other QT-for-handhelds project? Everyone converted to GTK (ach)?

Well, two of the main developers (zecke & mickeyl) are now working on the
GTK-based OpenMoko, and some others have moved on to non-handheld
projects. There are a few of us still here though :)

> In this case, most of us (I think!?) use as a base a Linux distribution
> for handhelds called Familiar. You can download a version of Familiar
> with OPIE or with . . . the GTK one, I forget what it's called.

GPE is what you're referring to.

One of the other problems here is that development of Familiar has
basically slowed to a halt (at least as far as anyone can tell from the
lack of public announcements), so there is currently no Familiar release
containing Opie 1.2.3. There is also the Angstrom distribution, but
unfortunately at the moment they still don't officially support Opie. To
me, this is the most serious problem because cutting off users also cuts
off potential new developers. I hope this situation will be rectified
soon. I have considered building and releasing some unofficial images
myself, but the problem with that is that I'd also be expected to provide
support for them and I don't know that I have time to do that and work on
Opie at the same time.

Personally I intend to see Opie 1.x through a few more releases. I think
there is still a place for Opie as it stands, particularly for people
using older PDAs that software-wise have been abandoned by their
manufacturers. From a user perspective I think Opie already provides a
good base, there are just a few areas where we need a little more
improvement.

To anyone out there, if you can contribute in any way - not just
development, but also by reporting bugs, improving documentation and just
generally keeping the community going, then that would be great. At this
point we need all the help we can get :)

Cheers,
Paul
Received on Wed Oct 03 2007 - 18:06:49 EDT