Re: Window Systems

[Iain Hallam <iain@bits.bris.ac.uk> writes:]

>I'm new to VSTa, but already I like it very much. Could someone tell me what
>state any of the various window system ideas are in? I saw posts in the
>archives from people wanting to take MADO further, and there was also some
>speculation on ports of other systems (notably X11?), but no one seems to
>have said anything since then.

MGR works.

MADO has some good ideas, but exists only in the form of some initial
bit-blit server code.

X11 could be ported, but there'll be some hassles with sockets and select().
Almost certainly a select() will have to be implemented. Of course, X11 is
a big, monolithic windowing system. If you don't mind running such things,
why not just run Linux or FreeBSD?

svgalib would be nice to have on VSTa. You could run dedicated graphics
apps directly on top of it, but you could also run things like X11, or
Squeak, or MGR. Properly coded, all of these could then take advantage of
the capabilities of a wide range of graphics cards. svgalib has many Linux
specific bits of code, though, so that would require some work.

GGI is a nicer layering of such graphics capabilities. However, so far as I
can tell from perusing the current code, it depends on things like svgalib
to handle the actual graphics card support. Therefore to get broad graphics
card support you still have to wrestle with svgalib, after which GGI might
be nice to port on top. Somebody with better knowledge can correct me.

                                                        Regards,
                                                        Andy Valencia
Received on Mon May 10 07:30:19 1999