gtk graphical installer: call for help
Last night I had a talk with fjp on IRC and we agreed that it would be
nice if the gtk fe were available for testing in the current d-i. I
think it would not be an "invasive" solution, since the default
installer would still be based on the newt frontend as a default,
unless you set the special boot paramenter "DEBIAN_FRONTEND=gtk" at
the startup.
What we need now is the right bunch of udebs which make it possible to
run the graphical installer. Lately I've played quite a lot compiling
and testing the libraries and the latest set of binaries I came up
with is available from [1] (only for i386); more details about its
contents have already been given a recent thread [2].
Last night I took a look at all the libraries and it looks like the
only component which needs to be debianized from scratch is cairodfb,
which can be grabbed from [3].
The other lib which needs some work is gtk+, which has to be built
with the directfb backend; the steps are quite easy and detailed
instructions can be found in [5]. The "debian" directory that you'll
find in the gtk+ CVS tree is dated 1998, so don't try to fix that like
I did last night (!$#), because the solution almost ready grabbing the
(very outdated) "gtk+2.0-directfb" via "apt-get source"; it is ready
for producing udebs... Tonight I'll check if it has to be fixed to
be usable with the latest gdk-directfb sources.
The easiest way to compile all the libs, would be the following:
* set up a sid chroot environment
* install the precompiled libs [1] (tar xzf dfb_2.7.2-0_sid.tgz -C /)
and you should be ready to compile and link binaries with directfb support
(gtk.so for example)
Well, if somebody want to help (expecially with cairodfb), it would be
thoroughly appreciated.
Ciao,
Davide
References:
[1] https://debian.polito.it/downloads/dfb_2.7.2-0_sid.tgz
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/08/msg00081.html
[3] http://www.directfb.org/index.php/viewcvs.cgi/
[4] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gtk%2B/?only_with_tag=GTK_2_7_2
[5] http://www.directfb.org/index.php/viewcvs.cgi/gdk-directfb/README?rev=1.30&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
PS:
I don't want to "steal" poackages to official maintainers who will
certainly make available official debs/udebs once official upstream
source will be available: the proble is "when will the libs be available
upstream?". I reckon working on it from now will meke it possible to
see a graphical installer in a much shorter time.
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