Re: [vague discussion] woody boot-floppies plans
On Tue, Feb 08, 2000 at 05:03:49AM +0000, Glenn McGrath wrote:
> Randolph Chung wrote:
> >
> > I think framebuffer is the right way to go, but whether it's in the form of
> > a custom library or not... i dunno. Unfortunately none of the common
> > framebuffer libraries (GGI for the most part) have widget sets.
> >
> Berlin is based on GGI, i wonder whether berlin can provide anything
> like this, or could be close to in the near future.
Berlin is too big, and has too many dependencies (eg, CORBA). It's a
wonderful system, but is not suited for an space-limited install (though
if the choice is between X and Berlin, Berlin might stand a fair chance,
spacewise. They're difficult to compare, though, and if you have X then
you probably don't need to worry about space).
> There is an X server for GGI, so GGI could be the basis of a higher
> level graphics GUI.
>
> But i have to admit ive only read about GGI, i havent used it, anyone
> more familiar with this than me?
I have a feeling that GGI is too big.
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 74k Dec 23 17:19 libgii.so.0.0.7*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 57k Dec 23 17:19 libgg.so.0.0.7*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 114k Dec 23 17:33 libggi.so.2.0.0*
Input modules (not sure which of these are needed):
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 37k Dec 23 17:19 ggi/input/linux_joy.so*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 50k Dec 23 17:19 ggi/input/linux_kbd.so*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 41k Dec 23 17:19 ggi/input/linux_mouse.so*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 41k Dec 23 17:19 ggi/input/mouse.so*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 23k Dec 23 17:19 ggi/input/null.so*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 34k Dec 23 17:19 ggi/input/stdin.so*
I also have 3Mb of various display drivers, and its anyone's guess which
of them do what. Here's a guess as to what we'd need:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 73k Dec 23 17:33 linear_8.so*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 73k Dec 23 17:33 stubs.so*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80k Dec 23 17:33 fbdev.so*
So something like 570k for a minimal framebuffer configuration (these are
my several months old cvs checkout, btw; dunno how much that effects matters).
>
> > Microwindows (search on google) shows some promise. If we can find something
> > so that we don't have an extra piece of code to maintain it's probably best;
> > but if we do decide to work on a custom library, I'd be interested in
> > helping out.
I don't know much about this but it does look fairly impressive. Seems to
be 237k for the server, and it's not linked to anything but libc and libm.
I don't know if it would be more or less appropriate than bogl, though.
Another thing to throw out there -- Graydon Hoare has been ecstatic on
the berlin-design list recently over his discovery of libart, which, though
distributed as part of gnome, is actually a powerful 52k drawing library
which he ported to GGI in a night; a port directly to fbcon probably would
not be too difficult. Again, though, this has no native widgets.
One thought in closing... I'm not sure what we gain from having spiffy
graphical entry fields over non-spiffy text-based entry fields, except
for another check box in the distribution reviews. Not that this is
necessarily unimportant, but I'd encourage people to consider whether
the benefits of a putting together such a system outweigh the costs in
maintainance and complexity.
-- Nathaniel
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