Re: Desktop-style window management

Hi Micah,

many thanks for your very informative reply.

> > I'm evaluating which GUI to port to a non-unixstyle multitasking OS with
> > limited posix lib support. Although the CPU performance is more like
> > "embedded", the use is a highresolution desktop rather than a small 
> display.
>
>If you're using too big of a display on a small CPU, things will be slow
>without hardware acceleration. If there's any acceleration hardware, picogui
>should be able to take advantage of it with the right driver.

The graphics hardware is simple highcolor, linear memory mapped, 
non-accelerated,
but has about 30 MBytes/sec bandwidth. It actually can run Linux+X at 
usable speed,
so it should be ideal for PicoGUI+framebuffer with the native small OS.

> > Does this mean overlapping PicoGUI windows are only supported via X, 
> not on
> > bare framebuffer without X?
>
>For now yes, but this is planned to change. Part of this is the App Manager's
>responsibility, and part of it is in the video driver and rendering engine.
>
>Currently PicoGUI's built-in rendering engine doesn't support overlapping
>correctly. However, there is a 'rootless' mode where all top-level windows
>are managed by an external system. This lets picogui do overlapping in X.
>On the framebuffer, you could do the same thing using DirectFB. PicoGUI has
>no DirectFB driver yet, but it wouldn't be much work to write one.
>
>There are plans to rewrite PicoGUI's rendering engine using a pretty nifty
>new algorithm that would make all drawing more efficient, and support
>full overlapping. Once this is done it would be easy to remove DirectFB if
>desired.

I would like to avoid DirectFB, this hardware wouldn't benefit from
the abstraction of graphics accelerators anyway.

Frankly spoken, my problem is the decision between Nano-X (with existing
acceptable window manager, but "old-fashioned" and more client resource usage)
and PicoGUI (nice architecture, but very young and yet no suitable window
manager.)

Since FLTK is unusable on my system (lack of C++ compiler for native OS),
and TinyWidgets is no more developed, I tend toward PicoGUI, because it
has promising serverside widgets and themes.
But as things look, I would have to wait for your new rendering engine...

Can you give me a rough idea how far in the future I can hope for full
overlapping windows support? Are we likely talking weeks, months, or years?

Thanks,
Peter




-------------------------------------------------------
This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
Welcome to geek heaven.
http://thinkgeek.com/sf