From: Andreas Beck <becka@rz.uni-duesseldorf.de>
  To  : p.guehring@poboxes.com
  Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 22:26:11 +0200

Re: ggi / gii problems, please help

Hi !

> 1. The mouse.
> I have a GGI Visual, which should react on mouse(or other pointer)
> events.

If you have a visual, then it usually has all normal input sources open.
You can add more inputs using GGI_INPUT is necessary. But mouse should be
open.

Please check, if it is configured right. You can use the monitest program in
the flatpanel check mode to test and look how it is done.

> But it says that the mouse resource is temporarily unavailable.

This is probably due to GGI already holding it open.

> Additionally I have the question how connect the events to my visual.

This happens automatically you use the ggiEvent* functions instead of the
giiEvent* ones, and are done with it.

> 2. Color modes
> What I need from the programmers side is an 8 Bit (256 colors) visual.
> When I am in an X-Server, which uses 16 Bits, my program won't run.
> Is there a possibility to let ggi automatically convert the thing to
> the needed resolution? 

Yes. The palemu target will take care of that. Start the program like

GGI_DISPLAY="palemu" ./program

and it will push an emulation layer in.

> ( I don't want to tell the users they have to restart X in 8 Bit mode)
> What I currently do is to ask ggi for a Direct Buffer, and use it.
> This is no problem with X, but when I try it with SVGALIB, then it

SVGAlib usually does not export direct buffers. Only few cards can map their
RAM in with SVGAlib.

> says there would be no /dev/fb/0

That is not from SVGAlib. This is from the fbdev driver of GGI.
Please force usage of SVGAlib using GGI_DISPLAY="svga" and make sure that
this actually uses SVGAlib, and does not bite its own tail by using an
installed SVGAlib wrapper.

> I tried to install KGI, but it crashed my machine, when I loaded the
> kernel module.

What card do you have ? What driver did you use ?

> 3. Packaging
> I found no documentation about how to create a distribution:
> I will compile a rpm package, which the users will have to install 
> from the CD-Rom.
> Will the program (normally linked to ggi) work, if the users do not have
> ggi already installed? 

No. LibGGI cannot be linked statically. It always makes use of dynamic
linking to accomodate to the various subsystems it can run on.

> How can I make it as easy as possible for them? 

Provide LibGGI RPMs as well. AFAIK there are LibGGI RPMs out there, so you 
can very probably garb the required .spec files easily.

> What exactly needs to be installed?

I would recommend to install the whole thing. It is 770k stripped libs,
which is pretty small IMHO. You can strip that down massively by not
installing the targets and modes you do not use, like most pseudotargets, 
memory, 1bit rendering, ...

CU, ANdy

-- 
= Andreas Beck                    |  Email :  <andreas.beck@ggi-project.org> =