Hello, I am following the DirectFB development and System for quite some time now and was playing with it for 1-2 weeks now and the results where really impressive.
I compiled GTK+ CVS HEAD with directfb support (not linux-fb) and played around with the gtk-demo. Later on I had the idea trying to compile GNOME using directfb itself since the GDK backend of GTK supports it and I know that many GNOME libs/apps support direct GDK calls rather than X11 calls. Thus my idea was to try to see how many libraries and gnome apps could be compiled without X support that this fails was absolutely clear to me since certain GNOME libraries are simply tied to X11 functioncalls. After spending some days with it I was able to hack around some stuff only to see how far I could go having things run wasn't my first intention, it was only to see how much of GNOME could be compiled without X and I figued out that half of it compiles without significant problems. The idea of directfb comes really handy because I somehow see it as a total replacement of Xfree (maybe not now but maybe in a couple of years). Think about the benefits you trash 150mb of Xfree in favor of 200kb directfb library, having your linux kernel boot into a framebuffer environment will also come closer to what the old Amiga Desktop used to be, no Console+Desktop environment anymore. Everything becomes one. You boot linux (or any other framebuffer supporting plattform) and voila be in your GNOME desktop. I have written 2 emails to Desktop-Devel-List some weeks ago and also talked with various people about it. The idea itself is brilliant but realizing it may be difficult and wasn't thought any deeper by me. But here the 2 mails that I wrote, it explains a bit more the benefeits that I see of this idea becoming true. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-May/msg00805.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-May/msg00849.html Could I interest some people to think about this idea and at least helping me to convince the GNOME developers to use and support directfb whenever possible so for the future a possible port may become easier ? I am now subscribed here because my other email that I sent here obviously never showed up. So I would pretty much like to get an answer. Having one of the dominating Desktop Environments support DirectFB (not XDirectFB) would probably be a big push forward for the directfb team and probably results in more people getting interested into it. From my personal experience many people heard about DirectFB but simply have no clue until one stands up and tell and show them. And from personal eperience a lot of people simply were impressed after they got shown. greetings, Ali Akcaagac -- Info: To unsubscribe send a mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe directfb-dev" as subject.
