> Yep, I plan to copy that example into my app and run some tests.
Interested to hear how that comes out...
> I'm not installing anything special. GNOME or any other display manager
> is not installed or disabled.
There are some *very* light-weight X window managers around, that might be worth a look, as they do make managing the windows easier. Including flwm, now I think of it!
That said, we've done a few "kiosk" things running a full screen window with no WM and that's a good option; that sounds like what you are doing, too, I guess?
> I'd would actually prefer to run off of the frame buffer; however FLTK
> wasn't quite there yet and not sure if development is proceeding for a
> variation that does go to the frame buffer, it was stated to be planned
> for one of the future releases. Not going to complain, right now it
> works pretty good.
I wouldn't hold out for a framebuffer variant, it doubt it will happen.
I confess I don't really understand why folks are so worried about X that they think FB is a better option; we used to run X on 50MHz 486's back in the day, and still have enough compute resource left to do useful work, so running it on a modern embedded CPU is a non-issue these days; what's the BBB got? It's 1GHz or something CPU, plus a pretty decent GPU stack...
Also, if you are running a lightweight X (I'm thinking tiny-X/ K-drive stuff here) the resource footprint is lower again.
If you really want to try FB, then a possible option might be to build nano-X for your FB, then use fltk on nano-X; current fltk-1.3.x works pretty well on nano-X, Georg has some pertinent notes on his site, and I posted a howto about it not so long ago, too.
If you want to go that way, I have some patches to nano-X and to fltk to improve font handling under nano-X that might be useful (supports text rotation and stuff, that the "stock" fltk-on-nano-X doesn’t do, for example.)
> My xorg.conf is very limited, in fact more of it is tuned to disable all
> the power saving and screen blank features. The other important change
> is that the screen is rotated 1/4 turn because the native mode is
> landscape and we use the display in portrait orientation. This also
> means that we don't have to rotate the graphics, and just specify stuff
> like the window is at (0,0) and sized (240x320) for QVGA screen size.
Yup, sounds about right; though you do need to be sure that something will serve fonts, usually fontconfig and so forth these days...
> Formerly I used an ATOM CPU with Qt 4.6. I actually got Qt 4.8 running
> on this Beagle; however it ate almost all the resources; I could only
> get it working compiled as static. Since I got a rudimentary FLTK test
> app up, I'm now expanding it.
> The fonts are some plain vanilla variation. Maybe the screen rotation
> is interfering, I may yet learn that.
I suspect that you are getting the fallback built-ins, because no font server is available?
Is that possible?
> The demo that I did is fine, but pretty much everyone said "that font is
> a poor choice .... looks a bit too small and very low graphics" Right
> now it is readable, just not ideal and not too pretty.
> So I'm writing the core of the app and meanwhile I have a very limited
> main screen version of that app which just has a text field and a
> button. I'll use that limited version to experiment with the fonts by
> taking from the cited examples. It'll probably take me a few days to
> get to that. I may find that what I have is missing installed fonts. I
> did a minor bit of searching for stuff like "Angstrom fonts" and such.
> Nothing obvious. I started with the 3.8 Angstrom kernel for the
> Beaglebone Black and the default RFS that they have; however I trim the
> features down by way of not starting things, the first example being
> GNOME. And also have to install some stuff to get things working
> properly for my actual app. My guess is I may have one or two more
> crappy fonts actually on the system and may have to install some more to
> make this work properly.
Is there no debian for the BBB these days? I had thought there was... I'd certainly go with debian over Angstrom, based on my experiences with each.
> I've used Pi systems too, but we attach a normal monitor to those. The
> Beagles can IMHO more readily take a small touch display.
OK; though I've seen some pretty neat stuff done with the R.Pi and a touchscreen. The BBB has a more capable CPU, but the GPU stack in the R.Pi is "better", so it kinda depends...