Hi!
As some of you might know, the debian-installer uses GTK+ on DirectFB as
its front-end. We were thinking of adding an integrating terminal
window to the graphical installation process.
I have looked at libvte [1] which is part of GNOME libraries and can
provide a terminal emulator in the form of a GtkWidget.
[1] http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/vte/
This library seems exactly what we need to add this feature to d-i.
Unfortunately, it does not work correctly on the DirectFB backend of
GTK+. After having hooking the integrated debugging of libvte, I know
that the terminal itself fully works: the process is there, I can type
commands and the resultings characters are processed by libvte.
But I happen to see nothing on the screen except a black empty square.
It's probably some incompatibilities between the way libvte displays
characters on the screen and the DirectFB backend for GTK+. I would
really like to get that issue fixed, but I don't have a clue about the
process of debugging such issues.
Maybe someone familiar with GTK-DFB could just look at libvte's code and
figure out pretty quickly what is going wrong, which could be great.
But I would also be dilligent to try to work out what's happening
myself, but I won't be able to do so without some tips or pointers on
how to do that. :)