Alpha Version of Gtk+ Port of KHTML

Hot on the heals of the port of Gecko to Qt comes a pre-release of a port of KHTML to GTK+. Released components include KJS JavaScript interpreter, KHTML rendering engine, Qt porting layer, WebKit API for embedding and a reference browser for demonstrating the functionality of the other components. Their website explains that this was done by Nokia Research Center. They hope to collaborate with another project also porting KHTML to GTK, Gnome Webkit. Footnotes has the story.

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Comments

by xyz (not verified)

No! I think a common VFS library for all linux apps would be the right thing to do...

by anonymous coward (not verified)

...we missed him very dearly and thought he had disappeared from the planet already.

by Anton Velev (not verified)

Man, I have been around all the time reading stuff.. I am happy 1/3 KDE user (+1/3 OSX, +1/3 XP). Seems I like and prefer KDE to Gnome. I migrate our staff out of XP platform to FreeBSD with KDE.
However I don't feel comfortable with GPL, so KDE for us is just a great desktop like XP but at least more UNIX friendly (for sure). What I am trying to say is that I would never plan basing any GUI app on non-LGPL/BSD platform. I am happy with Java, and I am considering X or Gecko for future but definitely not GTK. However if the good KDE API is ported to GTK and has no GPL obligations would even fund and contribute such projects. Why? Well if you ask yourself a question why FreeBSD and not Linux you would answer yourself.

Talking about UNIX I think I feel right now in a very good condition to write a XP to UNIX migration article.... Let's get started.

HOW TO MIGRATE YOUR ENTERPRISE TO UNIX
--------------------------------------

1. Choosing the right UNIX.

There are lots of options for choosing UNIX. Most of them coming from the OpenSource world. In most cases a commercial UNIX is more incompatible or hard to build the tons of free apps coming from the OpenSource world. Many of this apps are helpful so you would either have to spend a lot of time of hacking to rebuild your commercial UNIX where you could possibly damage something and lose support. OpenSource UNIXes are therefore more friendly to the free apps.
When choosing your UNIX you must consider the ability to update easy your apps and something to keep the integrity of yuor system. If you always download the stuff yourself and compile you are risking the system unless you are willing to spend lot of time on regular basis to keep this integrity yourself. RPM-like binary is a good option however you are dependent on distro compile options and availability of all packages. RPM source sound better, but not best, and again the availability problem.
Here you find BSDs and especially FreeBSD with richest ports collection on the net. There are also a couple of Linuxes out there like Gentoo that copied what BSD did. If you have some legacy linux experience already it is a good time to switch to something more real like BSD UNIX. Some people may feel trolling here, so I leave this option to you to choose between the pioneer in ports and the real UNIX - BSDs or the UNIX immitation - Linux.
If you don't have UNIX experience choose Linux it will be a easy option, choose a distro with RPMs because they will take care of everything.

2. Preparing the migration.

Make a local file server. Create accounts for all users, and have them save all files in this location, best is if no file exists that is saved on local machine except if it's just something temporary. Prepare a backup script to be safe if something goes wrong with your server, if you cannot do this have one admin to do it for you. You also will need a old machine to serve as your router, here FreeBSD wins. Some people just prefer this little devices that serve as router+switch + eventually wireless, however a old machine + BSD is a better option if you want to have better control.
Users that don't understand anything about console, scripts and UNIX at all can continue operating on their XP boxes, but will be ready at later point to migrate to Mac or other UNIX like FreeBSD (if you are good enough to configure the desktop to be enough familiar and install familiar apps (kde+moz+OOo helps)).
For other users that have some programming experience something better can be done for them. Install cygwin, putty and WinSCP, get them familiar with this apps. Generally if they need to do a console job on their local machine they will start using cygwin (instead of command.com), if they need to do a console job on the server - putty. Then if they need to transfer to directory that is not shared with Samba WinSCP, note that once you show them the 'scp' command after a certain time they will prefer scp instead of WinSCP.
Other than that, something that applies for all users, start using OpenOffice and Netscape (last version), this apps are already available on UNIX and once they get comfortable with them they are ready.

3. Acutal migration
There is nothing special to do once former XP users already are using Netscape, OpenOffice, putty and cygwin. Once they sit on a real UNIX machine they will feel much more comfortable. Moreover konqueror will ofer them features that are very UNIX friendly while Explorer didn't - for example they can set permissions by accessing file properties, or they can do 'ln -s' by just dragging the dir in konqueror. Users are much happier with a real UNIX instead of the UNIX simulation ran on former XP box - konsole is better than putty, konqueror is better than explorer, Mozilla is same as Netscape, OpenOffice is exact the same, and even more on UNIX they would have much more apps - there are tons of free apps on UNIX.

4. What's next
Start thinking how to migrate other users to UNIX. For some of them may be the only option will be Mac since it's right now the only UNIX with full set of apps that XP users use. Probably in long term strong commercial apps like Photoshop, Corel or Flash currently supported only for one UNIX platform - Mac, would start supporting other UNIXes.
Also you can help your customers to start migration, give them advices to use Netscape (strnong points are that this is business-branded version of Mozilla, has much better security compared to IE and has tabs), also most OpenOffice has some stong points (it's free, it makes PDF (you have first to explain why PDF is good format for documents)). At later point you can have your customers with small router and a local UNIX Samba server if they have more than 3 machines.
The direction is clear UNIX everything!

5. Optional step - Motivation
If you are a GPL fan you replace everything 'UNIX' in this article with 'Linux', and you can explain to people why GPL is the best to express such motivation to migrate.
However if you are BSD & UNIX fan you would explain to people about the >30 history of UNIX. You would explain why GPL is not good. You would explain why UNIX is reliabe, proven and so on, you could also mention about BSD, X, Apache and MIT licenses and the major difference to GPL. You could also exlain about the unix heritage of BSD, etc, etc whoever prefers a real UNIX compared to UNIX immitation knows the story.

6. Background
All this is real story. I was planning to add a X server running on the XP box to ease the migration, but I found this irrelevant since KDE is very friendly these days. The only problem we had with KDE was that in version 3.1.4 on FreeBSD 4.9 the folders in konqueror tree are "sticking" to the mouse cursor when you click them, however after recompiling it it was fine.

If you want to recommend Linux to newbies and you love freebsd, obviously you don't choose a rpm based distro but choose debian. Even more easy is installing it right from Knoppix, add in your /etc/apt/apt.conf the line 'APT::Default-Release "testing";' and 'apt-get update/upgrade' every day and you're done :-) (maby localize your sources.list too)
In our company, some are more or less migrated. But you only talk about common applications. Our problem is autocad/step7/WinCC/ all written for NT/W2k (even upgrading to XP is not always possible). (btw if somebody from Germany reads this and happens to know some Siemons folks, please ask them why they are so MS minded). Anyway sollutions are developing Wine until they work (probably undoable for something so picky like WinCC) or give another OS so much userbase that it would be commercially unwise not to support. And the one, and only one is ... Linux.

by Anton Velev (not verified)

AFAIK gentoo is the most FreeBSD-like Linux in terms of ports

That should scare off a lot of potential users then :-) (unless they are compile freaks of course and yes it's the good old Debian<->Gentoo debate).
Anyway what's more interesting is where you don't comment on, the possibility proprietary niche software will come to our favorite platform.
(BTW s/Siemons/Siemens/)

by Anton Velev (not verified)

Why you are mentioning Siemens so often? Are you related with them in some way?

About the migration to UNIX of user that use proprietary apps, there are several options:
(the order is applicable to soon you can get them running)
1) short term option for most of the commercial apps - buy a Mac
2) WineX & CrossOver for apps that don't work with Wine (although this would be option only for Linux AFAIK)
3) Wine for apps that work with Wine (yes - eventually WineCC for future)
4) design a new learning curve that avoids apps not available for UNIX
- apply this new learning curve for all new users
- start training old users
5) don't write apps that are bound to MFC, WinForms, Avalon or other libs that chain you to certain platform or toolkit that is not BSD/LGPL. This in fact is a longer-term strategy if you already have some apps to rewrite. Following design of the apps can be followed when designing new (or refactoring old) apps (assuming you are using C++):
- split the GUI from the app business logic
- use STL in the app business logic or other _standart_ collection/structure frameworks and facilities that must be for sure BSD or LGPL, and don't use any CString, GObject, QObject or other toolkit related objects that bind your app business logic to certain platform or toolkit
- make a thin interface for interaction between the app and GUI
- make a thin GUI layer that implements your interface but uses the platform-dependent GUI - this will free you to switch for future to other toolkits and platforms
- (optional) be sure GUI toolkit is not GPL or not Royality free. This would not apply if you use the app in house only, but however for long-term strategy you would not be willing to spend double time on maintaining more than one toolkits so better choosing a Royality free toolkit from the very beginning.
- if you have web-apps make them browser independent, also if they use properitary server platform switch them to Java, PHP, perl, zope/python etc.
- if some of the GUI apps do not require to run on desktop you can make them web-apps too

Tried to cover wide range of cases, for everything I can guess right now this would work, and will really give you in long term a solid and permanent migration to UNIX, while at the same time staying as free from GPL or Royality not-free platforms, toolkits or frameworks.

No not related, just tied to their software. As you may know, they more or less dominate the industrial control software in Europe. No way, their apps will run with Wine-whatever.
You talk about writing new software and only use standards or LGPL/BSD stuff. Although I think you say, don't write anything for KDE, it's not the point what I was referring to. That was the existing stuff.
Sure I can switch to an UNIX CAD program, there might be SCADA systems for Linux too (VISpro). But I can't convince the 'industry' to switch, these people are conservative (for good reasons of course). Which means we must keep NT/W2k systems up and running. And it's not Linux <-> NT, because using Oracle/DB2 on Linux is okay. But don't try to sell MySQL/ProgreSQL. My colleagues want to work with Linux, but if Step7 doesn't run, that is mandated by our customers, it's end of story.

by Ali Akcaagac (not verified)

I've just hacked GTK-WebCore into Atlantis only to play around with it. GTK-WebCore looks quite promising but still needs work.

http://www.akcaagac.com/atlantis.png

For more information about Atlantis.

http://www.akcaagac.com/index_atlantis.html

by Anonymous (not verified)

> For more information about Atlantis.

Your advertisement here is uninteresting unless you offer the GTK-Webcore version for download.

by Ali Akcaagac (not verified)

Why don't you look at the topic of this Article, links and everything is provided. Simply go there as I went there and download it. I also don't think that my advertisment is uninteresting. The entire thread is for GTK-Webcore (KHTML) and I just demonstrated how easy it is to adopt it for own productions.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Where does the article link the GTK-Webcore version of Atlantis?

> only to play around with it.

Difficult to understand?

by Maynard (not verified)

And how's GoneMe comoing along right now?

I guess by now people know what a

What strange way of packaging and releasing a binary and not source code.

by Hans Kottmann (not verified)

I've just tested it for looking how it works. It is quiet very unstable but I've noticed that it is much faster than Konqueror itself. I'm using SuSE 9.1 with KDE 3.2.1 and Konqueror is slower than Mozilla. Due to this I've switched to Opera, IMHO currently the best browser on the market.

There is no way Konqueror is slower than Mozilla because nothing is slower than Mozilla. It's just not possible. Anyway, Konqueror is super fast here.

by Hans Kottmann (not verified)

Wich version of KDE and which distribution are you using?

by Hein (not verified)

Well a KDe port of abiword would be nice...

by Sebastian (not verified)

truly.

by xyz (not verified)

Desktop fragmentation is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the success of the linux desktop.

A good desktop requires all applications to share the same infrastructure. For instance the same VFS (A KIO wrapper on top of GNOME-VFS for instance), the same component architure for scripting and so on...

To merge KDE and GNOME at the basis would multiply the value of all the excellent and hard work already done. Isn't that reason enough to try for it?

by Crusty Crab Cake (not verified)

Desktop fragmentation is a huge obstacle. A merger of KDE and Gnome technologies would move the desktop on Linux well beyond where it is today.

by Roberto Alsina (not verified)

Go merge Microsoft and Apple, then I'll do the KDE/GNOME part.

I wonder if people actually believe they are being original with this :-P