From: Andrew Apted <ajapted@netspace.net.au>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 00:41:22 +1000

Re: I've seen the stars too... [Re: kgicon, etc]

Rodolphe writes:

>  Well, first note: I too like the "./stars" demo program. And that's true,
>  it looks even nicer when running on a _standard_ kernel... :-)))

So display-fbdev works ?  That's good to know.  Note that is it wise to
enable "SysRq" support in the kernel, since it is easy for programs to
crash and take the console with it.  ALT+SysRq+K is SAK, which should
restore the console to the login state (press carefully : hitting L by
mistake is not good :->).  ALT+SysRq+R is also handy, the turns off RAW
mode which allows you to switch consoles.

>  And it works now !!! :-) (In fact, it even worked yesterday, the problem
>  was coming from the VESA monitor driver.)

I think my "screen shifted by half" problem occurred when using the
multisync monitor driver -- that narrows things down.

>  Another problem: checkmode reports that _all_ mode are available !!!
>  This is false. (I know my driver is not fully operational, unless it
>  self-improved while sleeping in the CVS tree...) What's the bug ?

The checkmode of LibGGI ?  I haven't fully implemented that yet...

>  Finally, not all demo are working... Should they ? (I still have to
>  handle the GT_DEFAULT flag, I know.)

Let's see, demo & flying_ggis & stars & dots should work.  (DUMB also
works here btw :->).  Anything that assumes a mode (e.g. 320x200) which
!= 640x400 (or whatever the hard-wired mode is) obviously won't work.

>  Another question: do the libggi demo take advantage of hardware
>  accelerations provided by the driver when using kgicon ? 

Nope.  First we need a way to channel KGI ioctls through the /dev/fb
device (won't be hard, just hasn't been attempted yet).  Then the
display-fbdev targets needs to somehow try these ioctls and fall-back to
the software methods (this is harder -- right now I have no idea exactly
how this will work).

>  >Maybe better is to install con2fbmap (and fbset) into /usr/local/sbin.
>  
>  Hmmm. I don't agree at all... This is pre-..-alpha software as you said.
>  Don't install programs that may eventually be broken... It is so easy
>  to just call "../util/con2fbmap".

Okay.  I use con2fbmap a lot, so it's in /sbin on my box.

>  If the multi-headed system is too complicated or does not work, maybe we
>  can simplify this thing, by forcing the _user_ to choose the "default"
>  vga card of its system.

Depending on the license issue, you could compile the kgicon driver into
the kernel and have it used from boot.  This is how I'd like it to be on
my system (once all the bugs are ironed out :).

Cheers,
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  Andrew Apted   <andrew@ggi-project.org>       \/