Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 14:21:39 -0700 From: Dan Charrois <dan@syz.com> To: freebsd-small@freebsd.org Subject: Question about programming graphics Message-ID: <A2E53F40-6BF3-460F-A6D3-832573B79EFE@syz.com>
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Hi there. I'm not sure if this is the appropriate FreeBSD mailing list to use - if not, please let me know where this question would be more appropriate. I'm in the early conceptualization stages of developing avionics for amateur-built aircraft, and would like to use FreeBSD as the core OS to develop on, likely using a couple of small single board computers cross-checking their results for redundancy. It would be using a flash-based filesystem for ruggedness. In any case, I need to be able to output graphics to an LCD display, but for efficiency reasons would like to avoid XWindows (all the overhead of providing moveable windows, pointing devices, etc. is useless since the configuration of the various display elements on the screen would be fixed. I suppose that the user would be able to choose between various display configurations, but they wouldn't be using a regular user interface in the true sense of the word. Have you ever tried to drag a mouse around, or even use a touchscreen, in heavy turbulence? :-) Since the avionics would consist of both the hardware and software as a bundle, I don't have to worry too much about thousands of different possible configurations. In any case, what options do I have? I'll be programming in regular C (not C++, though I could if I absolutely had to). Ideally, I'd like to know if there is a library or something that would let me initialize the display to a given resolution and then just use simple functions to draw lines, circles, etc., in different colors. An OpenGL implementation without requiring XWindows might be cool too, if it would let me render three dimensional objects at fixed positions on the screen. I've done a lot of command line programming in FreeBSD, but so far no graphics programming, in XWindows or otherwise, so I may be missing something basic here. It just seems like a full-blown XWindows implementation is completely overkill for my purposes and I'm looking for something simple to use and set up. Or is there an XWindows "lite" configuration that lets you output simple graphics to the screen in fixed places without the user interface component? If anyone can point me in the right direction (or really, any direction for that matter) it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Dan -- Syzygy Research & Technology Box 83, Legal, AB T0G 1L0 Canada Phone: 780-961-2213
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