On 2007-11-03, David Bolen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Grant Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> I'm looking for GUI toolkits that work with directly with the >> Linux frambuffer (no X11). It's an embedded device with >> limited resources, and getting X out of the picture would be a >> big plus. > > Sounds like a reasonably modern "embedded" system since traditionally > neither X (nor Python) would likely have even been plausible in such > environments.
Yes, it's "modern" enough to run Linux/X11 -- horsepower-wise it's sort of in the PDA class of devices. wxWidgets has been tried, but it's pretty sluggish. Hence the search for something a littler lighter weight. Using Python is probably going to be a little bit of a stretch, but using open-source libraries and something like Python for the application langauge seems to be an important part of the business model. > Depending on the higher level GUI functionality you require That's still a bit up in the air. Routines to render text would be nice, as would sprite graphics. I don't think text entry or much in the way of windowing is required. > and how tight the resources really are, you might want to > consider investigating pure drawing libraries and then > implement any missing GUI elements (widgets and mouse > handling) you need yourself. There is no mouse. I'm not sure how many "widgets" are required. Probably not very many. > When I was looking for an embedded graphics library for a prior > platform (ELAN 486, 2MB flash, 6MB RAM) under DOS, we took a look at > these: > > * GRX (http://grx.gnu.de/index.html) > * Allegro (http://alleg.sourceforge.net/) > > We ended up using GRX, primarily because it was the simplest > to develop a custom video driver for to match our platform, > along with having a simpler core. We were under DOS but also > used it with a later generation of the platform under Linux. > Both libraries support operation over the framebuffer in > Linux. Our app was in C++ (Python wasn't an option), and we > implemented our own buttons and text widgets (in our case we > never needed any scrolling widgets). > > There aren't any Python wrappers for GRX, but the library is > straight C which should be easy to wrap (manually or with > something like SWIG). No built-in widget support at all (some > sample button processing code in a demo module), but easy > enough to implement your own if your needs are modest. > > Although we didn't end up using it, Allegro is more fully > featured (actually with some non-GUI cruft too since it > targets games), and also appears to have two work-in-progress > Python bindings. Some basic widget support in dialog > processing routines. Thanks for the pointers. -- Grant -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
