GNOME 2.3.x DirectFB support

[Ali Akcaagac <aliakc web de>]

Hello,

With this email I would like to ask if I could interest the one or other
programmer to help writing patches for the existing gnome modules to
support directfb.

I have thought about asking this for quite some days now and came to the
conclusion that asking wont hurt after all. I was playing with directfb
for the past couple of days (only for interest and educational reasons)
and found it quite an impressive project. I then started to compile GTK+
HEAD and it worked perfectly with directfb, some minor applications
which are GTK related worked like a charm with directfb (including AA
fonts and without X or Xdirectfb). Later on I tried to compile the
entire GNOME (only an education) but unfortunately I must admit that I
hit on problems because a bunch of libraries and applications are to
tied to X11 and it would be pretty nice to substitute the functions with
GDK ones (if possible).

Most of the time libraries and applications compile perfectly when you
simply change

#include <gdk/gdkx.h>   with
#include <gdk/gdkfb.h>

unfortunately other libraries such as

startup-notification, libwnck, libbonoboui, ..., and a few more needs
deeper changes because a bunch of parts are simply to tied to X11. All
in all from 82 modules I was able to compile over the half. But I needed
to hack some stuff out from above mentioned libs only to see how far I
could go.

Please respect that I don't want to start a discussion about why I like
to have GNOME run on directfb and what you think that I think may be
wrong with XFree and why not use xdirectfb and so on but my personal
interests with directfb are simple and I want to give you a few personal
reasons.

a) Memory consumption. I think that XFree eats to much memory,
b) Loading times of XFree86,
c) Speed and more direct hardware access,
d) nearly 130 mb of XFree86 compared to 200-300 kb of directfb libs.
e) to make GNOME to use as many GDK functions as possible instead of
   directly calling X11 calls.
f) to interest the developer during development to think about using
   GDK calls in favor of direct X11 calls whenever possible.

BTW: Maybe we can shift this conversation to gnomesupport.org

greetings,

Ali Akcaagac