[fedora-arm] RE: Windowing under Fedora_ARM (was Serial console under Fedora_ARM)

[Vijay Raju]

Hi Kedar,

Thanks for the heads up. I don't think that the system that I am working on
is really geared up for GNOME. Speed is limited to 266MHz, RAM to 64MB and i
have 1GB of storage. Also I am using an older kernel,  2.6.23. I guess that
puts me at a considerable disadvantage. A little bit of research has got me
thinking about two options:

1. Build a simple barebones X-sever. Something like this post:
http://linux.omap.com/pipermail/linux-omap-open-source/2004-November/002175.
html. And use a client intended for small systems like Matchbox
(http://matchbox-project.org/). I saw libmatchbox is part of the published
packages. A package with some compiled examples would be nice :)

2. Abandon X altogether and move to something like Qt. I saw Qt was also
part of the list of packages. Maybe I can use that.

For the touchscreen I came across this project http://tslib.berlios.de/. It
looks it is or was maintained by Russell King.

Warm Regards,
Vijay Raju 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Kedar Sovani [mailto:kedars at marvell.com] 
Sent: 15 August 2009 08:46
To: Vijay Raju
Cc: Prabhanjan Sarnaik; fedora-arm at redhat.com
Subject: RE: Windowing under Fedora_ARM (was Serial console under
Fedora_ARM)


Hi Vijay,


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vijay Raju [mailto:vijay at embeddedmachines.com]
> Sent: 14 August 2009 09:31
> To: Kedar Sovani
> Cc: Prabhanjan Sarnaik
> Subject: RE: Windowing under Fedora_ARM (Serial console under
> Fedora_ARM)
> 
> Hi Kedar,
> 
> Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on beefing up
> our kernel
> to get a whole variety of devices up and running. One of my
> primary
> intentions while adopting fedora was to simplify the testing
> and adoption of
> these devices in various ongoing project. So far things have
> been working
> out great. We have had a good measure of success with devices
> on the USB
> host. We were quickly able to integrate a WLAN dongle, HID
> devices and mass
> storage.

Cool, this is great! :-)


> 
> The next challenge is a UI. I already have a framebuffer device
> and a
> touchscreen controller driver written and compiled into the
> kernel. I have
> never worked on any kind of UI systems or window managers and I
> am pretty
> much starting from scratch. Considering that, could you suggest
> a set of
> packages that I could use to build up a quick demo showcasing
> the LCD and
> the touchscreen. 

We have managed to get the Gnome stack functional on the ARM board. Here is
a blog post that talks about that.
http://fedora-arm.blogspot.com/2009/07/fedora-arm-goes-graphical.html

You have to install the X and the Gnome package groups from the
repositories. I suppose there are a couple of packages missing from the
group, you might have to skip them manually (These are already built, just
that they haven't hit the externally published repositories yet.) A detailed
listed of steps is available here:
http://fedora-arm.blogspot.com/2009/07/steps-for-getting-x-gnome-working.htm
l


Once that is done you should be able to get the X going. There were a few
other problems seen when we installed a system this large a size. These are
documented in here:
http://fedora-arm.blogspot.com/2009/07/dhclient-firstboot-and-hald-woes.html


I haven't given a shot to the touch-screen interfaces though. If you are
looking for any set(s) of packages for the purpose, that aren't still in
there, do let me know.



> 
> Warm Regards,
> Vijay Raju
> 


Best,
Kedar.