DRI Comes to DirectFB

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.

Comments

Re:Oh, by the way...

[IamTheRealMike]

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

Great 'article' about how to get a nice console

[humming]

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/

Re:Here we go....

[MartinG]

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.