Hello Werner, On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 10:34:31AM -0300, Werner Almesberger wrote: > Rafael Ignacio Zurita wrote: > > it is a new virtual terminal for Openmoko, with a complete fullscreen > > keyboard and sound. > > Wow, I love this idea ! Alas, it looks a little slow. (Haven't tried to > run it yet, just looked at the videos.)
the tar.gz package is faster than videos ;-) because I recorded those before a few good changes in the code for perfomance. Anyway, > Here's an idea how you could perhaps make it much faster: > > A long time ago, I discussed with Carsten about what the Glamo could > do for us. Predictably, this quickly turned into some rather extensive > bashing of this ill-fated chip. On item that came up is the lack of > proper support for a feature X11 calls "compositing": > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing_window_manager > > The Glamo hardware has the ability to blend images, but, if I recall > our discussion correctly, X11 expects the blending operation to support > certain formats which the Glamo doesn't. So the conclusion was that it > wouldn't be possible to accelerate full X11 compositing with the Glamo. > > However, perhaps what the Glamo can do is enough for your full-screen > overlay. So you would put the X11 framebuffer in one (off-screen) > memory area A, draw the keyboard in an area B, and whenever X11 or > keyboard manager have updated their screen content, the Glamo would be > told to merge screens A and B into the real frame buffer. I would definitely like to use this idea. But, I don't know anything about glamo and if somebody is working in such features. > This may also make it easy to do things like dynamically changing the > respective brightness of the keyboard overlay and the background with > the actual content. (*) Ha!, good item for the TODO list. I will add this idea soon in the current implementation :-) > Now, having said all this, I have to admit that making the Glamo do > anything is rather hard, and I've heard that X11 isn't trivial either. > But several people have started to work on even more complicated things > (DRM, GL, ...), so maybe there's someone who could help making an X > server with such functionality. Yes, I will stay tuned in this list. Maybe I would try to help if that were possible (but I have read that it is either pretty hard or not very useful at the end). > (*) For this, you would have to have a means to "turn on" the keyboard. > This could be done by tapping an area where there's no key or where > there's a key that doesn't do anything unpleasant (Shift or so), by > just absorbing the first tap if the keyboard is dimmed, or perhaps > by distinguishing a light touch of the screen from a tap. > > Oh, and where are the applications ? :-) When Openmoko first announced > the Linux-based GTA01, I read a lot of jokes about the kind of user > interface a Linux phone would have. Usually they were of the kind > "making a phone call is easy and intuitive:" > > # phone dial -d /dev/ttySAC0 --number=+123456789 --voice > > But I wonder if something that would make a call with simply > > # call foobar > > wouldn't be about as convenient to use as a GUI. Hang up with ^C, > background and do something else with ^Z, etc. :-) Well, the FatFingerShell has all the useful keys already there (ESC, Tab for auto-completion, CTRL+whatever.. etc). So yes, I need easy-to-use scripts to do everything from shell, like a real geek does :-) -- Rafael Ignacio Zurita Buenos Aires, Argentina _______________________________________________ devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
