DF Console GUI

[Nigel Weeks]

Woops, I didn't reply to the list, sorry if this is out of step.

>
> No, KGI is not part of DragonFly. I've tried it once on FreeBSD. It's
> kinda huge and I didn't feel like (im)porting it. I'd rather like to
> have it _small_. Then again, if someone ported KGI it would
> definitely
> be interesting to look at it again.

It does look big - 1.3MB patch to the 5.4 sources...

>
> If I had unlimited time I'd like to move most of syscons into
> userland
> (leave only a dumb emergency text console in the kernel for
> ddb and so
> on). Then we could properly care about UTF8 for syscons,
> implement small
> GUIs etc.
>
> Not sure if this approach needed drawing functions in the
> kernel at all
> or if it could be done better with a library like libvgl.
>
> If you would like to help with such a thing, be our dear guest. :)
>
> Sascha

I'll be the first to admit I've done virtually no c++ (three years at Uni,
but that was a while ago).
Would this be best acheived by the following:
A small, bulletproof graphics kernel module, capable of listening to a
semaphore(before the Network started) for graphical bootup, and perhaps a
port once the network had come up

A 'text console' app to provide a non-graphical console(for servers)
A 'gui console' app, probably powered by qt-embedded(saves re-inventing the
wheel) to provide a desktop environment, totally devoid of X11
And presumably, X11 can talk directly to hardware, but the kernel module
would have to get itself out of the way, allowing the X11 driver access?

I am a newbie to kernel programming, but I've been using *BSD's for about 6
years, and I like the look of Mac OS X(forgive me), and it'd be nice to have
a nice gui-based distro of a BSD...

Nige