Build GUI

[jcampbell05]

How would I build a GUI ?

[tschertel]

Maybe port wayland? Then port any DE and graphic toolkit, like xfce/gtk?

[evangreen]

We'd love to have a GUI. The biggest thing standing in our way today is the lack of accelerated graphics drivers. Implementing one of these graphics drivers will be a lot of work, and will probably require cooperation from one of the major vendors.

So it's on the radar, but with major blockers.

[severak]

what about some retro graphic driver (aka SVGA)?

[evangreen]

Yes, something like that could work, but I wonder how much acceleration there really is in the old SVGA hardware. We currently have kernel support for framebuffers, so it would be possible to create a GUI from that, it just wouldn't be accelerated.

There would also be some preliminary work that needs to be done to support mmaping the framebuffer in user mode, currently it's accessible only from kernel mode.

[seclorum]

I am mostly interested in minocaOS as a platform for exploring new paradigms in the GUI department, and one thing I would do - given infinite time and a working 3D acceleration framework - would be port something like MOAI to run on minocaOS: http://getmoai.com/ - with such a framework, the development of new GUI concepts seems to be a veritable cornucopia of opportunity. However, there is much to be done before such a port seems feasible ..

http://github.com/moai/moai-dev/

[seclorum]

Or, even LOAD81:

http://github.com/antirez/load81

:)

The point is: MinocaOS+Lua+Lua-Frameworks = Happy Happy, Joy Joy.

[evangreen]

MOAI looks like it depends on the Android NDK, which would be its own can of worms to port over. LOAD81 could work, as it looks like it mainly depends on SDL. If we could get SDL ported over and working on a basic frame buffer, then I think there'd be a whole host of graphics goodies that would light up (including LOAD81).

So the main work here would be:

• Add framebuffer device and IOCTLs to allow user mode to get direct access to the frame buffer (and ask the kernel to stop using it).
• Port SDL.
• Rejoice.

[seclorum]

MOAI doesn't depend on the Android SDK - that's just one of the supported platforms. It also supports plain 'ol Linux, as long as there is a graphics layer to use - SDL or GL/ES. So, I guess it'd need to start with an SDL port (same with LOAD81 -> SDL) ...

[evangreen]

Ah, ok, I probably got turned around in their readme. Yes, it sounds like porting SDL is the gateway to both things then.

[evangreen]

We've now got SDL, X, and OpenGL all running on Minoca OS. It's all software rendering at the moment, but the building blocks of a GUI are all there. Check it out if you've got a chance.