On Mon, 2 Apr 2007, Antoine Martin wrote:
quoted text
> Jeff Dike wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 01, 2007 at 08:58:45PM +0100, Antoine Martin wrote:
> >> I reckon that one critical thing which could drastically increase the 
> >> user base would be to have a working virtual framebuffer implementation.
> > 
> > Why?  I've never understood what a framebuffer gives you that you
> > don't have now.
> Just like the network auto-configuration via dhcp, it would allow users 
> to download images+kernel and run them like appliances without 
> understanding anything about X or UML, just click and run.
> We are all capable of setting up Xvfb here, but most users are not, 
> which is why they download ready-made images.
> It would also make it a lot easier to focus on writing a management UI, 
> hell if there isn't one shortly after, I'll do one myself!
> Think of a UML browser image (running IE via wine in a limited image 
> with just X + wine + IE - I would much prefer that to having wine+IE 
> installed locally), testing framebuffer apps like gtk-fb/cairo-fb 
> without risking your dev environment, etc...

There are patches floating around for a UML frame buffer device.
Gerd Kraxel^H^H^H^H^H^HHoffmann did one using plain X11, which worked
great when I gave it a try.

A few years ago I tried doing one myself using gdk/gtk, but it didn't
work reliably on all systems. My main motivation was doing development for
different frame buffer memory organizations (think Amiga and Atari bitplanes)
on UML.

I suggest taking a look at Gerd's patches. IIRC, he posted them to lkml
last year.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds
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