On Sun, 2005-05-08 at 12:36 +0000, attilio wrote: > Hi everyone > > i'm involved in debian development and i'm actually working on the gtk > frontend for the debian-installer (the plans for post-sarge relase are > to implement a graphic installation system based on gtk). > Actually the gtk frontend module seems to work on a "X bench-test" (go > to http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/05/msg00242.html to see the > last news). > Experimenting with the gtk i've come to the conclusion that > -X gdk is solid rock but, for many reasons, is too big to fit on a > instalation cd > -the directframebuffer gdk layer, though longly unmanteined, compiles > and works but is still too buggy (gives serious memory corruption problems). > -the framebuffer gdk doesn't even compile > I'm posting to this mailing list to ask you if some future development > of the fb/dfb gdk are planned, since this would be the most appropriate > gdk layer for a gtk-based debian-installer. If you want something that works, really, X based GTK+ :-). There is really no reason why an X server should take more than 700-800k of disk space total. (Xfbdev, say) The X libraries are a bit bigger, but getting everything into 2 megs should be possible. Compared to the rest of GTK+ and its dependencies, compared to the set of fonts you need for an internationalized install, it's only a moderate space usage. And you get the big advantage that you don't have to build a separate copy of GTK+ for your installer. I don't think the work needed to get the "linux-fb" backend to GTK+ back into a working state is that large. On a rough guess, it's roughly a week of work for someone not that familiar with the GDK code. None of the existing GTK+ team members are planning to do that, but if someone wanted to pick up maintenance, that would be great. A suggestion I'd make would be to consider modularization of the input/output away from the core code. That would allow creating a "nested" device just took input and output from X ... and thus make testing a whole lot easier. Regards, Owen
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