Hi, As I said yesterday on IRC I made some d-i images with gtk frontend and freedesktop.org's Xfbdev [1] on them. Images itself and patches needed to build them are available at http://people.debian.org/~eugen/gtk . You can boot either mini.iso or netboot images from netboot.tar.gz but make sure that you have VESA 2.0 compatible videocard and you boot with 16- or 24-bit videomode (you can use 'vga=0x314' for 800x600@16 or 'vga=0x315' for 800x600@24, 1024x768 modes should also work). Images with 2.6 kernel can also run gtk-frontend but will not support mouse. After boot you should be able to see localechooser's menu and you may be able to choose language, but than cdebconf will probably segfault. To see image like this http://www.cluster.kiev.ua/eugen/cdebconf-gtk/fb.png , you may run other frontend, and do installation as usual until disk partitioning. Then gtk frontend should be more stable. How to build images yourself? Download gtk-fe-patches.tar.gz. Build packages xserver (produces xfbdev-udeb), pango-modules-udeb and fonts-udeb, apply patch to rootskel and build it, you may also apply patch for kbd-chooser and build it (but frontend will segfault before it). Then apply patch for installer/build, put compiled udebs to installer/build/localudebs and run 'fakeroot make rebuild_netboot' (you should also have some gtk libraries installed). What should be changed. xfbdev-udeb is now less than 700kb but probably it is possible to make it smaller. pango-modules-udeb should be generated from pango1.0 source package. fonts-udeb now contains only FreeMono (very bad), fonts for Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Punjabi and does not contain any CJK fonts. GTK & X11 libraries are big, but it may be possible to build udebs with less functionality (no core X11 font libraries (pangox?), build with -Os, etc...). cdebconf bugs. When frontned runs first time there is no main menu at the left, it looks strange. It do not support variable-width fonts vell. I've not seen 'Back' and 'Forward' buttons translated, does frontend use standard buttons? If so, it should be fixed, there is no standard gettext in d-i. Menus in the right window do not look like menus, try to look at partman. Menus do not scroll to make selected item visible, it is also not possible to scroll menus using keyboard. Even if d-i will use gtk-directfb, I hope that X11 frontend will help to fix some cdebconf-gtk bugs, before directfb images will be available. Regards, [1] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fXserver -- Eugeniy Meshcheryakov Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University Information and Computing Centre http://icc.univ.kiev.ua
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