porting amaroK to windows
July 2, 2005 – 10:23 amThis topic has been of great request, flame and bitchiness on the amaroK forums lately. I’m going to answer all of these threads in a succint manner.
amaroK will not be ported to windows until (if ever):
- amaroK 2.0, which will use the Qt 4 toolkit. Qt 3.x releases, although have windows editions, are not compatible with the amaroK GPL license
- KDE-libs, and respective engines are ported to windows
- There is an open source windows developer willing to do all the hard work. There is as much chance of any of the current dev’s porting to windows as there is copyrighted music download becoming free. I’ll do it if it does.
So, stop harassing us - it’s not going to happen for a while.
17 Responses to “porting amaroK to windows”
> There is an open source windows developer willing to do all the
> hard work.
exactly, let the platform support itself.
By Aaron J. Seigo on Jul 2, 2005
Is it selfish of me that I don’t want Amarok to be ported to Windows?
It’s like Amarok is one of the killer apps for Linux, and I want it all to myself. Muahahaha
By Leo on Jul 2, 2005
*cough* OS X *cough*, anyone? given the fact that there’s no decent audio-player for that OS , amarok would be ground-breaking, well, sort of.
and yes, that fink stuff is nice to play around and waste some time and cpu-cycles and blabla, but it’s not really the way to go in both, usability and integration. so, “amarok going native on OS X” would be quite a headline to be spread across the net, wouldn’t it?
By chimaera on Jul 2, 2005
Leo:
It’s not selfish, its just not going to happen
Chimaera:
The notion of a native OSX port is identical to that of the windows one. Once again, it would require a compatible GPL license, (hence amaroK 2.0, Qt 4, and a dedicated developer.
By Seb on Jul 2, 2005
Good news !
I wish all KDE developers were like that !
)
(when all OSS usefull apps are ported to MSWin, i’ll have an even harder time keeping pressure against DELL for our company not to switch to windows
Amarok definitely rules !
Great job guys
By Ben on Jul 2, 2005
Let me repeat what I just said on IRC, I think it sheds some light:
In reality, the “porting” process is gonna look different from what some might think. During the move to amaroK 2.0, we’ll try to remove most of the unixisms (like x-lib access) from our codebase, as to make it more portable. I expect this won’t be very hard, as amaroK doesn’t have many such dependencies.
After this cleanup, the actual “porting”, e.g. making it natively on Windows/Mac, might not require much more than a recompile, if we’re doing good work.
By markey on Jul 2, 2005
..forget to add this:
Qt is, after all, a cross platform toolkit. So basically the prospects for a good port are excellent.
By markey on Jul 2, 2005
Well I got another comment, I’m kinda doing brainstorming here:
Making amaroK’s codebase nicely portable will also help to prevent forking, which is pretty important to me. With the move to Windows and the possible growth of the user base, we’ll have the chance to attract many new developers. Would be a shame if those new contributions went into a fork instead.
By markey on Jul 2, 2005
Amarok is never going to port to windows ’cause windows sucks!!!
By Killermo on Nov 11, 2005
About OS X - which license issues are you referencing to? Trolltech released QT 3.2 with Mac OS X support under the GPL license back in June 2003.
However, the result can’t be anything else than a quick hack as long as you keep in mind that mac users are quite picky about their user experience, thus providing a native interface requires much work work than to switch to ‘aquaish’ buttons (e.g. the default qt skin). From my experience I think it would be wiser to opt for a totally banana interface, like, say, Traktor which doesn’t resemble any familiarity with Aqua or any other OS. Unfortunately my coding experiences are very limited, but I’d be happy about any instructions on getting amaroK to run on os x without the need of X11, and even ran into massive troubles with the fink ‘light’ approach explained in the wiki.
By losof on Dec 28, 2005
“No decent audio-player for that OS”…cute…funny…really. AmaroK would be a nice addition to the OSX library I’ll admit, but that statement’s just ignorant.
By Pakk99 on Jan 15, 2006
It’s too bad the amaroK developers aren’t willing to port their awesome program to Windows. Windows will never go away and it could use a nice addition to the free MS software world. So saying Windows sucks is the reason it won’t be ported is just stupid. I thought your mom was supposed to be supervising you on the net Killermo…
By amir8500 on Jan 21, 2006
No, you misunderstand - i said not a lot of effort will go into porting amarok to windows on behalf of the current developers. we are removing any non-portable references, in order to make amaroK ‘hopefully’ just work with qt4 on windows.
By Seb on Jan 21, 2006
Funny, I hate OSX users for being elitist… Good job guys.
By Mark on Jan 10, 2007
Porting probably would be a good thing for the userbase, there are other mediaplayer as Songbird nowaday which are crossed platform, but still they are not as good as Amarok!
I would keep it Linux only, its a killerap wich can be used to promote linux in general under those people who are stuck with itunes and winamp.
And remember, computers are liker airco’s they don’t function with windows open!
By byenary on Jan 15, 2007
Hello
wen kde 4 out is this later year you can run amarok under windows xp and windows visa.
But I i always say try linux its a nice os for free with Amarok., and use kde not gnome is poor.
Greets lInux torvalds
ps kd4 cmae also out for winodws and osx
By linux torvalds on Jul 15, 2007