[ECOS] Microwindows on eCos
Christian Plessl
cplessl@ee.ethz.ch
Fri Mar 2 03:48:00 GMT 2001
>What is all this of microwindows?
>
> Maybe I'm interested on it. Does it allows you to use all the development
>facilities of WindowsCE? Does it works with eCos?
The name Microwindows is leading you to a wrong track. Microwindows is used
for creating a graphics subsystem i.e. providing support for device
independent graphics routines and graphic device drivers. The project comes
in 2 flavors: NanoX and Microwindows. Based on the same libraries providing
graphic primitives, NanoX provides a X-windows like API whereas
Microwindows provides a more Windowslike API.
To my knowledge there is no generic graphics device layer in eCos yet. One
can argue whether the graphics subsystem shall be part of the kernel, like
in Microsofts Windows, or not, as with Unix running X-windows, where the
X-server is just an ordinary server application providing its services to
X-clients.
Microwindows is written that way, that you need to provide a module which
implements low-level support for graphics i.e. provide a framebuffer device
driver. If you have written this driver, you should be able to compile
microwindows and link it to your ecos application.
BTW: Has anybody implemented framebuffer support for VGA cards for the i386
target? I had a quick look on this, but initialization of the VGA card is
quite cumbersome especially when running in protected mode. I could not
find any good documentation on this.
Greetings,
Chris
--
Christian Plessl <cplessl@ee.ethz.ch>
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