Re: New GNU/Hurd project: Crust Display System

[Johan Rydberg]

"Niels Möller" wrote:

> What I think would be terribly useful is a decent frame buffer
> device/translator. The goal would be to make sure that ordinary users
> should be able to hack away at alternative graphic environments,
> without harming other users, and, as far as possible, without shooting
> themselves too hard in the feet. After all, that kind of flexibilty is
> what the HURD is about.
> 
> Does your project include any of that?

Well, that is not what I had in mind really, but it should not be that
hard for an application to communicate with the server (translator) and
use it as a framebuffer device (If you know what I mean).  

Thinking about it, it's a pretty good idea to create a framebuffer
translator/device. :)

My current idea of implementation:  There are two key parts of the system:

  1. The surface server -- just really handles the hardware and  
     sends events to the applications (surfaces).
  2. The client library -- is responsible for almost everything.
     implements all drawing primitives and event processing.

> Sorry if this sounds like yet another discouragement, but I think we
> have quite a lot of competing projects in the `user frendly, "nice to
> look at"' niche. GNOME, KDE, GNUStep, Berlin,... Ok, not all of them
> are GNU, and most use X, but that's still quite a lot.
> 
> Furthermore, I don't believe in creating a "desktop" software that
> does everything, from banging the gfx card hardware registers to
> look&feel configurability to interprocess communication like drag&drop
> and cut&paste.

I'm not planning to either replace GNUstep, KDE or GNOME - I'm planning
to develop an alternative to X - and write backends to both GNUstep and
GTK.  It is up to the client library (GNUstep, GTK, ...) to implement
the look&fell.  The server should just really "bang the hardware" - 
everything else is up the client.
 
> Happy hacking,
> /Niels

Thanks!

brgds
johan