After having a closer look on the current status of plex86 I want to start
another discussion on it's GUI.
I think that in comparison to vmware a propper GUI for configuration
purposes would be very important for a wide spread usage of plex86.
I've made some investigations about that.
1. Requirments to the gui:
- Widgets: (compared to vmware configuration)
Window, Dialog, Menu, Label,
Button/RadioButton/CheckButton
Edit/Multiline edit, ListBox, ComboBox, TreeView, Slider
MessageBox, FilePrompter
- Possibility to include VGA driver (how to include bochs plugins
???)
- Portable (Which platforms???)
- Licence: GNU GPL/LGPL
As already mentioned by Kevin in it's talk SDL is a very good choice
because it's highly portable (Linux X11, Linux framebuffer console,
Win32 GDI, Win32 DirectX, BeOS BDirectWindow, MacOS toolkit, MacOS
sprockets, FreeBSD 4.X X11, Solaris 2.X X11, and IRIX 6.X X11)
(http://www.libsdl.org)
Based on SDL there are some GUI widget sets already available:
Generally SDL has the focus on game development.
(i. e. support of mixer, sound, gui themes...)
GUIlib-1.1.0: A rather simple widget set. Currently seems to have too
less widgets and professional look to be useful. Licence: GNU LGPL
(http://www.libsdl.org/projects/GUIlib/index.html)
libuta-0.3.35: Besides Menu,ComboBox,TreeView,FilePrompter all of the
needed widgets available. Also mixer and sound support. Wigdet
extensions by subclassing possible. There are some demos but almost
no documentation about the API. Licence: GNU LGPL
(http://libuta.sourceforge.net/)
paragui-0.6.4: Besides Dialog,Menu,ComboBox,TreeView,FilePrompter all
of the needed widgets available. Wigdet extensions by subclassing
possible. Some demos and excellent API reference documentation
available. Licence: GNU LGPL
(http://www.bms-austria.com/projects/paragui/)
Another choice could be wxWindows.
(http://www.wxwindows.org)
wxWindows-2.2.5: It's portable too (Win16, Win32, GTK+, Motif,
MacOS, OS/2 in progress, GTK+ itself is almost ported to BeOS) has all
widgets needed and even
much more. Available since 1993. Native look and feel. Also classes
for threads, resource management, print support, resize... are
available. Btw vmware supports wxWindows.
Based on my own experiences version 2.2.5 is already very stable.
Lot's of example apps and excellent API reference documentation
available. Licence: GNU LGPL
Following link contains a global overview of GUI toolkits/frameworks:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/7184/guitool.html
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