New QT Target Proposal

[Benjamin Long]

Greetings everyone! I hope that this is the correct place to be posting this. 
Please point me in the right direction if it is not.

Lately I've been lamenting the lack of a good Linux handheld environment. The 
only one I've every really liked is Opie, a fork of Qtopia V2. In the light 
of very painful happenings in the Opie comunity I began thinking about where 
things are headed in the future. Back when Opie was started the most powerful 
handheld we had was a 200MHz Arm proc w/ 32MB of ram and 16MB of storage. The 
screen was only 320x240 resolution. You were hard pressed to cram anything 
built for the desktop into something that small, although Konqueror made it 
in an embedded web browser only version.

Today, I own a Nokia N800. It's a sleek little handheld that already runs 
Linux. It's far more powerful then what was available in the 'old' days. 4x 
the RAM, 16x the internal storage, 5x the screen real estate, and a proc that 
can do floating point work in hardware (wow!). But it doesn't have the same 
usefulness that my old Zaurus had for every day things. It's not the 
hardware's fault. The software was just not designed for it.

So, I have a proposal. I would like to see libkde, and many kde apps, ported 
to run on Qtopia-Core. I've already begun working on it. So far I've built 
kdelib, kdepimlib, and kdebase on Qtopia-Core. It didn't take a lot of code 
changes, but there are a lot of bugs. Here is a video of some apps running in 
Qvfb:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ozRGmQPBs

Note that the goal would not be to have the entire KDE environment running on 
a handheld, since Qtopia-core doesn't use X, and we already have a UI in the 
form of Qtopia. One thing I would love to see is kdepim, with it's IMAP 
storage backend, running on a handheld. It would certainly complete the open 
source PIM stack (Server, Desktop, Handheld).

So, consider this a RFC. I'm looking for what you KDE devs think of the idea. 
I'm also looking for help, since I'm not a very experienced programmer. I'm 
planning on starting a project, and attempting to get some of my old 
acquaintances from the Opie project involved.

Thanks for your time!

Benjamin Long
AKA: Bipolar