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DRI Comes to DirectFB

Posted by michael on from the choices-are-better dept.

Pivot writes "To further heat up the discussion about the future of the graphical desktop on open source OSes: Now the DirectFB project works with DRI!. Screenshots are available. I guess what is lacking now is only XAA driver support, or native drivers for your favourite graphic card." We've mentioned DirectFB before.

4 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oh, by the way... by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Informative
    It's a thin layer on top of the kernel framebuffer driver - provides useful APIs and some other services that you need for a windowing system, like WM support. They were also working on a fast IPC mechanism called Fusion when I last checked up on them. Dunno how far that's got.

    The idea is to replace X with something closer to the hardware as far as I know, but today it's mainly useful in embedded scenarios. They have a backwards compatability thing for X clients, which means if you have a supported card you can run your desktop on it and make windows transparent with the capslock key. It's fun for about 2 minutes I should imagine.

    As an aside, does anybody know if the girl in that screenshot lives is single? :D

  2. Great 'article' about how to get a nice console by humming · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's tailored for gentoo, but most stuff applies to most distributions I guess. Not that I'm using them. ;)

    http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=49036

    Then you can get consoles which look like this:
    http://www.alledora.co.uk/images/fb0.jpg
    o r
    http://www.bootsplash.org/silent-mode.jpg

    Files can be recived from
    http://www.bootsplash.org/

    --
    I'm too stupid to preview.
  3. Re:Here we go.... by MartinG · · Score: 4, Informative

    DirectFB cannot gain network transparency

    Not only can it gain network transparency, but it gains everything that X has functionally in the form of XDirectFB, a rootless X server that puts X compatability on a layer _above_ the windowing system. Many people believe this is where network transparency belongs rather than entangled within the windowing system.

    --
    -- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz .@adgimnoprstu
  4. Re:Naive Question by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Informative
    So here's the stupid question: why didn't (or hasn't) someone build a graphical syb-system that's modular?

    Well, X is actually modular. It doesn't use the network subsystem when run locally.

    Why can't you have a well-written, clean API (I've heard horror stories from people who've had to write code directly to X)

    I've just been doing some Xlib programming (for wine). It's not that bad. Win32 is certainly a LOT harder and less intuitive. But very few people use Xlib directly anyway.

    that lets you plugin in modules like 'network-transparency' or 'anti-alisased fonts', or even everyone's favourite 'alpha-blended windows'?

    Yes, X provides exactly that, with the exception of alpha blended windows, but that's because more hacking is needed inside the XFree drivers architecture to make it work at acceptable speeds.