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Graphics Software

Qt For The Console 202

Posted by timothy from the better-not-be-an-AF dept.
lintux writes: "You probably know Qt as the fine toolkit for the less-fine X. Today something cool reached a stable state: Qt for the console. A Qt library port which allows you to port Qt programs to the console! Just imagine a full-featured web browser like Konqueror, on a 386 text-machine! I tried some things, and I never want to use w3m or lynx again, I can tell you that!" Update by HeUnique:While I do approve of the job these guys have done on console QT, I believe they may need to properly relicense their project under the GPL.
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Qt For The Console More

Qt For The Console

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  • "which is still being developed by Trolltech" (Score:4, Funny)

    by 56ker ( 566853 ) on Sunday March 31, 2002 @07:02PM (#3262478) Homepage Journal
    What? The Trolls have formed their own company? Oh no! :o)

  • LGPL? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by baywulf ( 214371 )
    Not to start a licensing flame war but... Can you relicense a derivative of an GPL library(QT) into LGPL?
    • Not to start a licensing flame war but... Can you relicense a derivative of an GPL library(QT) into LGPL?

      You can if you own the copyright, or convince the copyright owner to license it to you via different terms.

      This whole thing has been hashed out before, for that last several years. It's part of the reason GNOME exists. Where were you people, under a rock?
      • Figures that Slashbots would have a licensing debate before actually finding out if the project is real or not.

        Shame on you, don't you know that in some parts of the world it's already April 1?

    • Re:LGPL? YES you can (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Glorat ( 414139 )
      Well, let me be perfectly clear about this having seen the source to this. Actually, they can license this under LGPL. The reason is the same reason why WINE can be licensed under LGPL and not whatever proprietary licence Microsoft uses

      The reason is, having seen their code, is that they do NOT actually use code from the QT libraries at all but they purport to emulate the interface instead. Any indication to the contrary would be a misccmmunication by the authors

      So basically, since the source code consists of nothing but cout , I am sure their licensing choice is just fine =)
      • The free version of Qt is licensed under the GPL AND the QPL. Go read it here: http://www.trolltech.com/developer/licensing/qpl.h tml

        and roll down to section 6. "You may develop application programs..." which means even ify ou develop against the free version of Qt you have to relase it under the GPL. You're also not allowed to develop under the free version and then later decided to buy the commerical version and then start charging money because you did the development with the free version.

        RTFL.

        ~Kevin
        :)
        • Okay here you go:
          • Big whoop the QPL says that. I can pick the GPL version of the license.
          • Besides which, I can do it anyways as the copyright holder.
          • Trolltech is the only company that can come after me for violation of the GPL/QPL, they probably won't if I just got done writing them a check now will they?
          1. Did you know I can make local modifications to any GPL'ed program I want, and link in all kinds of proprietary pieces. It isn't until you distribute binaries of it that you are inviolation of the GPL. If the QPL has that extra term in it, and I have to license it under both, I am pretty sure that is an extra term and it isn't allowable under the GPL.

          Besides which, most of the dual licenses are an either or case, not a both case. Otherwise the Perl's GPL/Artistic license doesn't make anysense, the GPL is the only license because the Artistic license has a superset of the GPL's rights.

          2. I am the original copyright holder of the code. I can re-release any code I wrote under any license I want. With GPL'ed code, I would have to not link to anybody else GPL'ed stuff or I am in violation of their GPL. However, if I wrote all of the original code, I to say lesszilla, my incredibly small 500 line web browser and I link it with Qt using the GPL license. If I try and release lesszilla under a new proprietary license and link with Qt I am in violation if they take me to court. I am still the copyright holder of the original lesszilla code. I can convert the lesszilla code to SPL (Soul-eating public license) which in essense says you owe me your soul if you have one, but you don't owe me any money and I don't owe you the source code. I just can't link the the Qt via the GPL version with the SPL. I could go buy a Qt license and link with that and release it. I am the copyright holder, I can change the license I want to use. I can't force the older GPL'ed version to be non-GPL'ed (I am in violation of the somebody else GPL if I link with GPL'ed code they have the copyright for). I do have to own the copyright for all changes however. So I have to becareful I have all of the documentation to prove I am the copyright holder.

          3. Trolltech isn't stupid enough not to take my money. Depending on how the licensing works for them, they will more then likely charge me the current charges, or get me get me to pay for the license for the time during which I was developing it. They aren't stupid, they want my money, and I want to pay it to them, all that is left is deciding on the amount.

    • [Yeah I know it's an April Fools joke]

      If someone is reverse-engineering the API's and writing their own code they can do whatever they want

      Keep in mind that most GNU software and Linux itself are based on re-implementations of proprietary systems and aren't violating any licenses.

      Neither does WINE.

      So if this was real, and they just mimicked the QT library calls, they can license it however they want.
  • I seriously considered porting a program I developed to curses because sometimes a text interface is just faster, but now it looks like I don't need to. Very cool :)

  • main.cpp (Score:5, Informative)

    by GreenHell ( 209242 ) on Sunday March 31, 2002 @07:04PM (#3262483)
    #ifdef HAVE_CONFIG_H
    #include
    #endif

    #include
    #include

    int main(int argc, char *argv[])
    {
    cout "Hello, World! It is April Fools :)" endl;

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
    }

    April Fools! :)

    • umm... MOD THIS *UP* (Score:4, Funny)

      by jonnythan ( 79727 ) on Sunday March 31, 2002 @07:20PM (#3262555)
      That's the actual main.cpp from the downloadable file.

      The whole thing is a joke.

      • No, seriously guys -- get the source distrobution [linux.org], unpack it, and go into the qtconsole-1.0.0/src directory. There's one .cpp file, entitled main.cpp, that simply displays an "April Fool's" message and exit.

        Try for yourself. Slashdot editors really should read the stuff before they post it.

      • The irony is that some fool will probably be inspired by this, and attempt to implement it for real.

        Who knows - might even be useful...

        • The irony is that some fool will probably be inspired by this, and attempt to implement it for real.

          Sounds like Pavel Machek's project for running Gtk+ over curses [mff.cuni.cz]. (Yes, this one is for real.) That's from 1999 - I doubt he's still maintaining it....

      • "Hello, World! It is April Fools :)"
        That's the actual main.cpp from the downloadable file. The whole thing is a joke.

        Mod up for totally wasting a great April Fools joke? Would you also shout to mod someone up as informative, if he told everyone how some great new book or movie ends?

    • Re:main.cpp (Score:2, Informative)

      by dodald ( 195775 )
      That was a damn good April Fools joke! *Smacks Forhead*

      [don@myhost qtconsole-1.0.0]$ qtconsole
      Hello, World! It is April Fools :)
      [don@myhost qtconsole-1.0.0]$
    • LOL.

      It's amazing how much bloat a KDevelop project actually is...

      It can cause AC's to actually believe that a 294KB file with NO CODE is a complex text-processing library.

      Props Qt-Console team.
    • Wow, I'm really impressed. Finally I can use KMail both at home in GUI mode, and check from work via Telnet. Before I had to just do webmail from work, with the setting so that it didn't delete mail from the server, so I'd still get all my mail on KMail when I get home.

      Gotta say, great April fools post - I almost didn't download the source after reading that, thinking the whole thing was a joke. But it works good, damn good. Although I think I'll stick to Lynx if I want to do text-mode browsing. The ASCII graphics is cool, but the actual usable interface is a bit clunky.

      Good job to the coders of qtconsole - Having great fun trying all kinds of apps with it!!
    • <sarcasm>
      Next year, they may want to reconsider their timing of an April Fools joke.
      </sarcasm>

  • Holy crap. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by redhatbox ( 569534 ) <redhatbox@myrealbox. c o m> on Sunday March 31, 2002 @07:06PM (#3262494)

    From the QT-Console home page:

    "You might think we are sick or some console perverts. We do admit, we are console perverts, but consider this: why not? :)"

    As an illustration of just how sick these guys really are, I encourage /. readers to examine the following screenshot: Slashdot home page in Konqueror, ASCII mode [linux.org]. Notice the elegant Slashdot logo rendered in text. That, my friends, is a sure sign of a fiendish mind at work :).

  • There was a similar thing done for Java's AWT toolkit a while ago (article in Dr Dobbs). And I know that aalib comes with an ASCII X server. I wonder which of these three gives the best results? Probably the Qt-console port because it is the most high-level.

    A version of KDE using text-mode Qt would be very interesting to behold... or how about a 'desktop' using the aalib ASCII X server (for GTK, Motif etc. programs) plus Qt.

    All we have to do now is persuade the Mozilla team to add text-mode display to their bloated 'chrome' rendering system. I'm sure they will be happy to add it as a new feature before 1.0, after all they've thrown in pretty much everything else.

  • Performance is great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mbrubeck ( 73587 ) on Sunday March 31, 2002 @07:09PM (#3262505) Homepage
    With just a little Makefile hacking I got most of KOffice to compile. Now it runs nice and fast on my older UNIX servers [telnet.hu]! I'm looking forward to the next version with a compressed protocol [sf.net] that will improve speed on slow terminal devices.
  • This will make my little purple Gamecube console useful until games actually start appearing for it, right?

    Right?

    (sigh)
  • He trolls the X window system.

  • Recursion (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Sunday March 31, 2002 @07:12PM (#3262522) Homepage
    They have ported konsole... so the burning question is will Qt-console run correctly inside that? If so there is no longer any need for screen(1) or even window managers - konsole's screen-switching buttons can do the job of changing between windows.

    Or maybe Emacs's M-x term, if anyone ported Emacs to Qt.
  • This is cool, really, but Konsole? why? did they just want to create some kind of paradox?
  • With all due respect: Bullshit. Trolltech is the *author/owner*. Trolltech can release it under any damn license they please. YOU cannot take it, mod it, and rerelease under a different license. They can. Read the damned GPL. Good april fools joke, too.
  • (Porting Konsole) - They created a terminal emulator for a terminal? Whatever next?
  • Download the source and look at main.cpp in the qtconsole directory.

    The other poster who pasted the main.cpp wasn't kidding.

    IT'S A JOKE.

    THIS DOESN'T EXIST.

    • Re:IT'S AN APRIL FOOL'S JOKE (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      How sad I am :( It did look like a meritable project, didn't it? I was excited, then to find they put like 400 copies of hello.gif from goatse.cx to make it seem large-- I have a new hatred for Trolltech! TEH BASTARTS!
    • # make install
      Making install in qtconsole
      Making install in docs
      Making install in en
      /bin/sh ../admin/mkinstalldirs /usr/local/bin
      / bin/sh ../libtool --mode=install /usr/bin/install -c -p qtconsole /usr/local/bin/qtcon
      sole
      /usr/bin/install -c -p qtconsole /usr/local/bin/qtconsole
      # qtconsole
      Hello, World! It is April Fools :)
      #
    • I was just about to start putting Qt Nethack through this wringer but now I'm not gonna do it! Now you all just have to do with the old Nethack reviews...
  • I will assume that the editors of /. realize that this is a joke, as evidenced by the code of main.cpp
    #ifdef HAVE_CONFIG_H
    #include <config.h>
    #endif

    #include <iostream.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>

    int main(int argc, char *argv[])
    {
    cout << "Hello, World! It is April Fools :)" << endl;

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
    }
    If you guys didn't realize this, you're even worse than i thought, heh.

  • Hmm.. (Score:2)

    by bwulf ( 325 )
    You know, that's not such a bad idea..
  • That's nothing...I plan on finishing the port of Quake III to console in about 6hours.
    ;)
  • This looks really nice now, but imagine how wicked this is going to look like in svga-text mode.
  • You posted that one minute early.
  • I just compiled Konqueror and pointed it to www.goatse.cx. Damned if I know how, but the QT engine rendered the image therein as clean, crisp ASCII art.
    Perhaps the trollers who posted the ascii version to /. in months passed were using a beta of QT/console.


  • And so it begins...

  • April 1 (Score:2)

    by fm6 ( 162816 )
    Posting the story just as the Slashdot clock passes midnight is a nice touch. Except that it kind of spoils the effect for those of us who live west of Greenwich Observatory [nmm.ac.uk] and thus see a post time of March 31.

  • Although this is entirely fake... (Score:4, Informative)

    by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Sunday March 31, 2002 @07:56PM (#3262742) Homepage Journal
    Although this is a big april fools hoax, a real example of a GUI that works on the console can be found over at PicoGUI [picogui.org]. (as featured formerly on /. and elsewhere)

    The display framework of PicoGUI is so extensible that it will work on everything from a text-only 2 line LCD display (or smaller) up to a fully realized 3d environment courtesy of OpenGL (needs someone to code it but the OpenGL "display" driver is already in there).

    Some examples:

    X-Chat/PicoGUI running using PicoGUI's ncurses driver on the console:
    http://www.picogui.org/sshotdetail.php?index=47 [picogui.org]

    A couple of PicoGUI apps running on a 4 line Text LCD:
    http://www.picogui.org/sshotdetail.php?index=64 [picogui.org]

    PicoGUI running on OpenGL:
    http://www.picogui.org/sshotdetail.php?index=60 [picogui.org]

    This is mostly possible because of PicoGUI's strict distinction between content and presentation (Remember the design goal of the original HTML? - Bingo.) Anyway, it's a neat project to check out; the support for this is in and working now; it runs on everything under the sun; and development continues to progress at an extremely rapid pace.

    ~GoRK
  • You just GOTTA run this on a super text console (768 rows and 1024 columns) to appreciate the beauty of the design. No more annoying graphics, just pure ASCII goodness. My only problem is that the Quake ASCII renderer and Qt-Console fight over the text display, and the Quake ASCII get re-rendered by Qt-Console. Really freaky, it looks like....
    APRIL FOOL'S
    Go figure...
  • And so it begins again!

    For the record, I don't find this funny. Sure, if all stories marked "01 April 2002" were april fools day jokes it might be a bit more acceptable. But, I rely on news sites to deliver news, and that is how they built a metric of trust.

    I know Slashdot isn't exactly CNN, but surely they could do a little bit more to seperate those which are their stupid april fools day pranks from those which are not.
  • For those who expect to find stuff that matters at ./, try this: The founder of theKompany said in an interview with linuxandmain [linuxandmain.com] that theKompany will no longer use the GPL for any further projects. This might also mean that future versions of their current projects will be relicensed.
  • I wonder why the best slashdot's news appear on April 1st...

  • Why not have a character based X-server for the console (this would have been the real joke for April 1) ... If some open source dude could implement this in Emacs lisp, one could finally say: Now I can run all X-applications inside Emacs on a 80x25 serial terminal. Just press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+W, N to switch to another emacs virtualized X-window. So aunt Lilly will never have to buy a 17 inch monitor to run mozilla... :-)
  • For those who want to really run Qt apps on the console, id recomend Trolltech's QT Embedded [trolltech.com], wich allows you to compile and run various programs in a console framebuffer, I've successfully run Konqueror [konqueror.org] on a framebuffer. If my memory servers me right, there was a story some time ago about it on /., but i cant seem to find a link for it.
  • what is qt???

    • Re:qt (Score:4, Funny)

      by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Sunday March 31, 2002 @09:28PM (#3263167) Journal
      Qt is Quicktime. Qt is being devloped by Apple as a fully functional toolkit for creating GUI applications in X. Many Linux applications were written in Quicktime, in fact most of KDE is Quicktime. The licensing arguments are about the sorensen license, that Apple chose for Qt. It may or may not be compatible with the GPL.

      (Remember the date, moderators.)
  • I was trying to find documentation on how to run this program. My main question was it a library similar to aalib or was it a program I run? The site said most of it is found under the original qt docs, which I don't think it even mentions it. The the gzip had an index.html as a doc. Loaded it up, and found it just a skeleton of documentation with no real content.

    No man page either.

    So I thought, well it must be another typical program with poor documentation. It seems programmers these days don't even think about releasing any information until after 1.0?

    So I found the qtconsole executible after 'make' so I'm off to try it. I seriously hope that the program is lacking as much as the documentation.

  • Qt-Console is a joke, but... (Score:3, Informative)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Sunday March 31, 2002 @09:08PM (#3263073) Homepage
    this [ch-werner.de] is not. It's a port of Tk (the Tcl graphical toolkit) to curses, and it is truly excellent.
    • this [ch-werner.de] [ch-werner.de] is not. It's a port of Tk (the Tcl graphical toolkit) to curses, and it is truly excellent.

      Well this looks interesting. Is there a screen shot of something reasonably sophisticated around? I ran your basic hello world two buttons and a field example and it worked ok but it's hard to get a feel for how navigation is handled. Are there some good example apps to try? I tried to get the make xconfig tk gui for configuring the kernel but it bails right away without any informative sorts of messages.

  • I for one am happy that the QTconsole team took the time to make their software build on FreeBSD. However, for an April 1st release, it still leaves much to be desired.
  • this is stupid. do these guys actually check these things out before they post?
    It's not even the right day yet, and this yearly crap has already begun. I maintain a 24/hour slashdot blackout on april fool's day, because of the overall retardedness displayed by the site in the past, but now they start a day early?
    Could an april fool's policy be posted somewhere?
    Something along the lines of, "Don't bother coming to the site on April 1. There'll be nothing worth reading and you won't learn anything. The humor isn't funny, either, so come at your own risk."
    Or something.

  • Gosh, what sloppy coding! (Score:3, Funny)

    by willybur ( 217434 ) on Sunday March 31, 2002 @09:45PM (#3263253) Homepage
    You might find you'll need to hand-edit the sources provided a bit to get the results advertised in the screenshots.
  • Why do people always put down X11? X11 with FLTK is smaller than Qt/Embedded, for example. X11 is a lot more efficient and considerably smaller than Quartz, the Macintosh graphics system, while offering similar functionality (including hardware acceleration, antialiasing, and transparency). And X11 also does as well or better than Microsoft's GDI. And on top of all that, X11 gives you the ability to use whatever toolkit you like and to mix applications running on different hosts on the same screen. If X11 didn't exist (and hadn't been widly successful already for the past 20 years), it would have to be invented.

  • Lynx? Why use something like Lynx? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jagasian ( 129329 ) on Sunday March 31, 2002 @10:49PM (#3263534)
    Lynx is second rate compared to the Links command-line web browser, which I use regularly under Linux... and I am using right now. It supports SSL, tables, and many other common web technologies. Oh, and did I mention that it uses less than 1MB of RAM? Its uber fast, and perfect for reading sites like slashdot. Navigation is a breeze... no mouse needed here. Also, since Links doesn't download the overboard graphics that many websites use, sites load far quicker than in other browsers because of the smaller download. Sure there is less eye-and-ear-candy, but the net is still full of content... and Links gives you access to that content.

    I love what Hotmail says, when I log in with Links. It says that my browser won't let me use Hotmails advanced features or something... whatever...
    • Another alternative to lynx is the ARACHNE [arachne.cz] Browser for DOS and Linux. It's a fully graphical console based Internet suite (browser, email, multimedia player), and it doesn' rely on the Qt library just svgalib. It will run on a 486 with a mere 8 meg of RAM.

      A full list of features and requirements can be found from the Linux Installation [arachne.cz] page of the Arachne website.

  • After all, there is a textmode quake [mr.net], always one of my favorites.
  • Lynx? Hell, I've been using:
    $ telnet slashdot.org 80
    GET / HTTP/1.0[enter][enter]
  • Interesting that the whole autoconf/automake/GNU shit can make the whole package so big (301 kb!)

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