On Mon, 2 Apr 2007, Antoine Martin wrote: > 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 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/