Re: Framebuffer port of GTK/GDK !!

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"ArcadePreserv Center" <arcadepreserv@hotmail.com> writes:

> I am interested in low end embedded systems, and I am interested in 
> GNU/Linux. Unfortunately a working graphical enviroment to use and run GTK 
> programs needs at least more than 200MB of secondary memory.

I'm not sure how you came up with this figure. With some work you
can get a functioning X system onto a couple of floppies, and GTK+ 
doesn't add that much more in size.

I don't have an exact figure for the minimum amount of secondary
storage needed to get GTK+ + X running, but I'd guess it is closer
to 20MB than 200MB. That is, of course, still too much for some 
applications.

There is a pretty wide range of things that get called "embedded"
systems; even considering only things that have a GUI, you can
range anywhere from a cell-phone, to a set-to-box, to a kiosk.

There are some regimes of embedded systems where GTK+ is simply
not going to be suitable, no matter what the windowing system
you are using. Running GTK+ applications in a system with less
than, say, 512k of RAM is probably not going to be feasible.   
(Again, this is not an exact figure, just a rough guess.)

> I have been looking at GTK. From what I understand *all* you have to port to 
> get a full GTK enviroment running without X, (which is needed for low memory 
> useage, both internal and secondary) ported is GDK, the underlying drawing 
> toolkit. This has also been done, there is a ms-windows port of GDK, GTK and 
> the gimp, using the former.
> 
> 
> So, to get the GTK programs to run on small (embedded ?) system, we need to 
> port GDK to a non X-windows enviroment.

It is certainly possible to port GDK to a frame buffer, and there
are definitely applications where having such a critter could 
be a big win.

The first thing to do, however, would be to get a better idea of
exactly what systems one wanted to target. How much RAM? How
much flash/disk? How much CPU? How big a screen? Are multiple
applications needed at once?

Regards,
                                        Owen