RE: DF Console GUI

2006-03-02 Thread Nigel Weeks

> > and I like the look of Mac OS X(forgive me), and it'd be nice to
> > have a nice gui-based distro of a BSD...
>
> I completely agree with you on this - the ability to render
> graphics on
> boot, without having to deal with X11 configuration
> (immediately) would be
> wonderful.
>
I've had a bit of a look at KGI, and while it provides a lot of images
loading features and a handy API for getting console graphics
workinghang on, sounds good...

blow it, I'll see if I can get it going.
http://kgi.sourceforge.net

By the looks of it, and app can register to use the display. Just needs a
mini window-manager, and you've got a simple GUI.(understandment of the
year)

Hmm, Dragonfly Desktop Edition...

Nige.



RE: DF Console GUI

2006-03-02 Thread Justin C. Sherrill
On Thu, March 2, 2006 7:12 pm, Nigel Weeks wrote:

> and I like the look of Mac OS X(forgive me), and it'd be nice to
> have a nice gui-based distro of a BSD...

I completely agree with you on this - the ability to render graphics on
boot, without having to deal with X11 configuration (immediately) would be
wonderful.



RE: DF Console GUI

2006-03-02 Thread Nigel Weeks
Woops, I didn't reply to the list, sorry if this is out of step.

>
> No, KGI is not part of DragonFly. I've tried it once on FreeBSD. It's
> kinda huge and I didn't feel like (im)porting it. I'd rather like to
> have it _small_. Then again, if someone ported KGI it would
> definitely
> be interesting to look at it again.

It does look big - 1.3MB patch to the 5.4 sources...

>
> If I had unlimited time I'd like to move most of syscons into
> userland
> (leave only a dumb emergency text console in the kernel for
> ddb and so
> on). Then we could properly care about UTF8 for syscons,
> implement small
> GUIs etc.
>
> Not sure if this approach needed drawing functions in the
> kernel at all
> or if it could be done better with a library like libvgl.
>
> If you would like to help with such a thing, be our dear guest. :)
>
> Sascha

I'll be the first to admit I've done virtually no c++ (three years at Uni,
but that was a while ago).
Would this be best acheived by the following:
A small, bulletproof graphics kernel module, capable of listening to a
semaphore(before the Network started) for graphical bootup, and perhaps a
port once the network had come up

A 'text console' app to provide a non-graphical console(for servers)
A 'gui console' app, probably powered by qt-embedded(saves re-inventing the
wheel) to provide a desktop environment, totally devoid of X11
And presumably, X11 can talk directly to hardware, but the kernel module
would have to get itself out of the way, allowing the X11 driver access?

I am a newbie to kernel programming, but I've been using *BSD's for about 6
years, and I like the look of Mac OS X(forgive me), and it'd be nice to have
a nice gui-based distro of a BSD...

Nige



Re: DF Console GUI

2006-03-02 Thread Sascha Wildner

Nigel Weeks wrote:

I was reading through FBSD6's /usr/src/sys/dev/syscons to find out more
about libVGL programming, when I noticed some code based on DF code.

Does anyone know of examples of code using these syscons graphics libraries?
(Want to have a shot at porting Qtopia (was QT-embedded) to BSD)


Nigel,

libvgl does not call code from sys/dev/misc/syscons directly. It has its 
own routines for drawing. The code in syscons itself is kinda optimized 
towards drawing the things syscons needs (filled rectangles, characters, 
mouse pointer) quickly.


On the other hand, if you take a look at vga.c you'll notice that work 
on some generic kernel drawing functions seems to have been started 
years ago but so far nothing seems to use it. The video_switch_t has 
some function members for drawing (vga_fill_rect() e.g.).


If you are looking for examples that use libvgl, there should be some 
FreeBSD ports that link against libvgl. grep should find what you want.


Sascha