I have read some promising articles about directfb and experimenting with it on a debian squeeze system, but I am still unclear as to what I can do for me, leading to ask a few questions.
1. I understand directfb is a low resource replacement for X with a few caveats which might make it of interest no only in the context of embedded devices but also on slightly challenged desktop hardware, in my case, Pentium III with 386 Meg of RAM. Am I correct in assuming this? 2. I used a test debian squeeze sacrificial environment for a preliminary round of testing and much to my surprise the directfb lib's were already installed. I proceeded to apt-get the directfb/gtk package, assuming I would be able to use my environment to run directfb on top of my ramebuffer console -- that there was some command or other that I could enter at the bash prompt such as 'startdfb' maybe, that would pretty much do what 'startx' does and that I would find myself in a graphical environment where I might be able to start a terminal emulation or a web browser, but I could not find anything that looked like it might do this, either by grepping my system or googling for directfb howto's. Or to take another example, what I was looking for was something akin to the fbiterm command that lets me start a 256-color capable terminal emulator on top of the linux framebuffer. Is this the way directfb works, or am I misunderstanding directfb's design? 3. Since the applications I use on a daily basis were designed to work in the context of an X server, does this mean that I would need specific versions of xterm, GNU/screen, mutt, slrn, ELinks, etc. to be able to function under directfb instead of X? 4. Since I made the decision to run my applications full-screen a long time ago, and use mostly text-mode applications under GNU/screen, I only need a couple of the features that are provided by an X window manager, namely multiple desktops/workspaces and the ability to switch from one to the other via a keyboard action, and to accomodate my slothful nature, binding a few keyboard combos to the launching the applications that I run frequently. I have used Window Maker for a number of years and I doubt that it would happily run under directfb out of the box, so I'm wondering if such capabilities are provided by directfb, either natively or via some form of window management extension. Thank you for your comments. CJ _______________________________________________ directfb-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.directfb.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/directfb-users
