Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Rick Engebretson wrote:
That being said, the modern console is not your typical terminal, and the gpc CRT unit (and crtdemo with ncurses) goes far beyond putting characters on a screen. Ncurses also provides panels, forms, dialogs, mouse interaction, etc. It is a good program to have on your system.
Sure. :-)
Frank
On SuSE 8.1 (others mostly work too, RH9.0 not really) a high resolution framebuffer console driver (eg. 1024x768 pixels x16bpp) installs automatically with NVidiaTNT2 and MatroxG200 video cards. Both also get X11 installed. The Matrox card will install hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers from the distro, TNT2 drivers need to be downloaded. Thus, 3 different graphics interfaces are available.
What interests me is the framebuffer console. One can write directly to /dev/fb0 as user. This beats SVGAlib for graphics on the console. Further, the "stty" user command is available on SuSE. This can change the console (ncurses controls) size yet leave a lot of framebuffer real estate for pixel graphics. Your CRTunit detects this modified console size very nicely. Your CRTunit is very sophisticated. (re; the linux console (up to 128 of them) runs on high performance computers, not a 9600 baud serial line.)
The reason I'm plowing through C libraries is to mmap /dev/fb0. This should allow serious graphics capability on the linux console. The problem with mmap in existing pascals is they are incomplete. You can't do everything. So going directly to low level system calls seems easiest. But pascal has the best high level data structures.
Anyway, I found a very nice command line "sysconf" tool at sourceforge. The RPM installed nicely, and the shell command "sysconf --all" pours out useful libc macro data. You were right, feeding the macros is the real trick to C library binding. I'll play with this nice command tool and see where it gets me.