Re: bogl

[Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.org>]

Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>:

> > > How far are we from an i18n'ed version of bf ?
> > 
> > Soon I would like to try building boot-floppies with the language
> > chooser and all the messages in UTF-8 running on the UTF-8 virtual
> > terminal, just to see if it works. This way of doing things might
> > never be used in a Debian release because bowl might be ready in time
> > for the woody release instead,
> 
> Pardon my lack of clue, but what is "bowl" ?

Ben's Own Window Library, a GUI built on top of BOGL;
utilities/bogl/bowl-boxes is a demonstration of what it might look
like.

> > but a vitual terminal that shares code
> > with bowl could still be useful for running on vt2 or for when the
> > user wants a shell, and running dbootstrap on it is a good way of
> > testing the terminal.
> 
> Well, remember we do have post potato point releases.
> 
> I still think i18n'd potato boot-floppies is doable (maybe not by
> potato release, but not too hard) for potato.

Yes, I hope so.

> > Another fun thing I want to try is to see if fonts can be effectively
> > compressed using libpng instead of gzip ...
> 
> Huh... What's the win with that?

In some circumstances one might win space by using a more effective
compression algorithm for fonts. We might want libpng anyway, if there
are any (penguin) pictures to be shown.

If memory is an issue, as well as space in root.bin, then we should
mmap or lseek the font file rather than read it all in. I think it
should be very easy to mmap a BOGL font, so this is probably what I'll
do first.

Edmund