On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 08:02:51AM EST, Oliver Gabel wrote: > Hi Chris, > > Chris Jones wrote: >> >>> What I don't understand is, since you are looking for a complete >>> desktop environment, then what advantages do you expect from using >>> DirectFB instead of X11? >> >> Maybe satisfy my curiosity.. >>
> There is no question: DirectFB is really cool :-) Ah, now you're talking. Your earlier reply didn't really grab my attention, since you were mostly quoting from the rather insufficient wiki, which I had read about a hundred times and was still in the dark as to what DirectFB was and what, if anything, it might do for me. Yes I know.. If I'm not happy with the wiki, I can fix it or just shut up. But until I am able to set up a minimal working environment, that's not clearly not going to happen. :-) What confuses me is that I am back on debian "lenny" aka "stable", and most of the DirectFB environment appears to have somehow been installed, but I'm not such a debian expert that I could figure out how the libraries were pulled, and when. Here's what I have: | libdirectfb-1.0-0 1.0.1-11 direct frame buffer graphics - shared libraries | libdirectfb-dev 1.0.1-11 direct frame buffer graphics library - development files | libdirectfb-extra 1.0.1-11 direct frame buffer graphics - extra providers All I can say after doing a simulation of their removal from the system, is there are many packages that directly or more likey indirectly depend on these libraries. > Sadly there is no native DirectFB desktop environment (like KDE, > GNOME, or even a simple one such as WindowMaker) yet. That's precisely where I'm coming from: My 'desktop environment' is a VT100 emulator, either xterm or the linux console, on top of which I run the GNU/screen multiplexer. Screen brings up the applications I need at startup - i.e. vim, mutt, slrn, ELinks, ipython, weechat-curses, and a few instances of the bash shell. In case you are not familiar with GNU/screen, and although the underlying mechanism is quite different, it provides the functional equivalent of a tiling window manager, with the terminal emulator roughly playing the part of the X root window. I typically run my applications full screen and make good use their windowing and tabbing capabilities when they exist, such as is the case with vim or weechat, but I also use GNU/screen's capabilities in this area to display two or more applications side by side, resize their respective viewports, etc. For instance, vim + cgdb + bash on the same screen beat any IDE hands down in terms of effectiveness, and leave you plenty of CPU cycles to stream music in the background. In other words, I would have no need of a window manager, or 'X' for that matter, if it were not for a fraction of my web browsing activities -- ie. accessing web pages that ELinks is unable to display -- where I have to fire up one of the mozilla behemoths. Stricto sensu, I do not need a window manager at all, since I could be running my xterm+GNU/screen 'desktop' on VT7, one of the mozilla browsers full screen on VT8, and freevo on VT9, and use chvt to switch between them pretty much in the same way I use keyboard bindings to switch workspaces under Window Maker. I have this setup working right now and apart from the questionable appearance of the mouse cursor and the fact I cannot copy and paste between my VT's, pretty much everything is working the same way and giving me the same ultra-comfortable user experience as when I am running my 'desktop' on top of Window Maker. So basically, the deal is that since I don't use X's networking capabilities, that got me thinking that maybe DirectFB might come in handy as a replacement for X that would provide better performance with lower requirements in terms of resources and as such might be worth taking a look at in the context of my undepowered antiquated hardware. And in any case, even if DirectFB did not prove much of a peformance enhancement after all or had such severe limitations that I would have to stick with X anyway, I would have satisfied my curiosity on the one hand, and acquired some general knowledge that would help me put things into perspective on the other. Not to mention that having a friendly chat with a few people outside the main stream can be priceless on such cold bleak New York winter mornings such as this one. :-) > This is mostly due to the fact that there is no good (native) GUI > toolkit yet. There is a GDK port, which allows you to write an > application using GTK/GTK+, but you have to compile it yourself and it > seems that it has some issues... Not surprisingly, I dare say. But in terms of investment, this goes far beyond what I can afford to dedicate to my investigation at this time. That's where the XDirectFB layer would come in handy so I could see the stuff with my own eyes, warts and all. Unfortunately and as mentioned in an earlier post, even on the fairly current debian testing aka 'squeeze' I found no trace of it. > Also, someone started to port the Qt toolkit to DirectFB some time > ago, but it seems that this project was somehow abandoned; at least > you don't hear much about DirectFB-Qt these days. I don't really want to hear about Qt anyway, since I don't use a single application from the KDE/Qt world at this point - although that might change, since I have always hated the Gimp's interface and Krita might provide a useful replacement, quite sufficient for my modest needs in this area. > DOK, who is one of the founders and the lead programmer of DirectFB, > checked in a very simple native C toolkit called LiTE (LiTE is a > Toolkit Engine) into GIT a few years ago. Development of LiTE has been > going on since then, and it was used as a basis for the GUI of the > discontinued Palm foleo project ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foleo > ). However LiTE is still in a very early stage, and personally, I dont > like its structure... As much as I could tell, the 'First Look' video at brighthand.com demonstrates a nice clean GUI on that Palm Foleo, I must say. And I like the look of the little Lite popup on the DirectFB page. I could spend hours looking at GUI's as long as they have the looks, but I just don't like to use them even for a couple of minutes. That's why I started with stuff like Gnome and ended up using a VT100 emulation. ;-) > I know that there are some DirectFB lovers out there (including > myself), who would probably be happy to start a native DirectFB > desktop project if there was a powerfull and good native toolkit... *Another* desktop..? Don't you think there is already enough of that crud/bloat already..? :-) In any case, thank you very much indeed for all the information you provided. I don't suppose you are familiar with debian, but I think I understand enough now to check with the debian-user mailing list and see if anyone there is using DirectFB Thank you for your comments. CJ _______________________________________________ directfb-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.directfb.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/directfb-users
