Re: [Fwd: GTK+ without X]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Eric Bustarret <eric bustarret trium-rd com> writes: 
> 
> > Basically it's just a framebuffer port, as you might expect. It has
> > exactly the same programming interface as regular GTK 1.3.x (unstable
> > version leading up to 2.0). Its on-disk size is around 2.5 megabytes,
> > with all stuff compiled in; custom compiles can be a good bit smaller.
> 
> Does that mean that GTKfb and GTK 1.3.x are not scheduled to become stable ?
> Shall we wait for GTK 2.0 ? (do you know when it should be available ?)
>

GTK 1.3 is the name of 2.0 until it become stable, just as 2.3 was the
unstable version of Linux 2.4. So when 1.3 is stable it will be called
2.0.

GTK 1.3 already has 99% the same API that GTK 2.0 will have, so you
could already start developing against it. The final stable release is
a few months out I'm sure, but the API freeze is ideally quite soon.
 
> > What do you mean by touch interface?
> 
> I guess it is touch screen support.
> (kind of mandatory requirement for embedded devices of this category
> !)

Right, it supports at least some of them, though it may not support
all kinds of touchscreen it can be extended to support new devices
pretty easily.

> - do you know whether we can port GTKfb on top of VGA16 frame buffer
> ?

I'm sure it could be done, Alex (alexl redhat com) could tell you how
hard it is, I don't know really. It already supports 8-bit of course.

> (or has someone succedded in running it on top of a i815 based PC - note: I
> know this may looks quite strange but this is just for experimentation - not
> for development or any other stuff).

I don't know anything about embedded chips, but GTK FB should run with
little or no effort on any 32-bit chip that runs Linux. It would be
close to impossible to get it going on 16-bit platforms (GTK doesn't
like 16-bit ints and pointers). You could maybe get it going with a
more stripped-down OS such as eCos as well, but I don't know how hard
that would be, I'm no expert on this stuff. Anyhow GTK is probably the
least of your problems with a non-x86 chip, the main issue would be
getting the kernel, compiler toolchain etc., and once you have that
GTK should Just Work.

Havoc