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Driver: X11
Author: Salvador E. Tropea
Status: Not complete, random suggestions and details
Revision: $Revision: 1.10 $
This file documents details specific to the X11 driver. By X11 I mean the X
Window system version 11 release 6 also known as X11R6. The driver was tested
with XFree86 and Solaris.
Currently this file isn't organized and just contains things I think
somebody could need to know.
* The X11 driver was tested using Debian GNU/Linux Potato and Woody and
Solaris 2.7 (Sun Ultra 60 machine).
* The driver was tested in True Color modes, I didn't have the time to check
it in palette modes (256 colors usually) and I'm almost sure nothing works
for monochrome mode. If you need it working for 8 bpp depths please contact
me and we will try to see a way to solve any issue. I don't have any
motivation to expend my time working on 8 bpp modes if nobody needs it.
* The approach used is slow in favor of portability and features. A lot of
enhancements can be done. If you know about X11 programming and have some
time please consider helping with it.
* The driver uses 8x16 and 10x20 fixed fonts, no X fonts. In the future I
plan to code a driver supporting X11 fonts. Why? simple: because in this way
I can change the screen encoding on the fly and I know all the needed symbols
will be available. The library supports over than 40 encodings which needs
over than 580 symbols in the fonts. They cover the latin variants, cyrillics
and greek alphabets. Not all X fonts supports all the needed symbols, in fact
True Types usually have only ASCII characters. Additionally we need fixed
width fonts.
Currently the fonts provided by SETEdit project have more variety than the
XFree86 fixed font, which in fact are included.
* I use monochromatic XImage objects for the fonts and I let X to expand the
colors. XFree86 seems to be quite ineficient doing it, while Solaris' X is
much faster. I think we can get much more speed by expanding the colors to an
internal bitmap and then doing the blit in one operation. But this needs
special care about different color depths and colors organizations. I guess
the color values returned by X can make it easy, but never tried.
* The implemented clipboards are XA_CLIPBOARD and XA_PRIMARY. Only XA_STRING
format is supported.
* I don't have a default icon, if you can create one please send it to me.
* Debian GNU/Linux Potato specific (maybe others too):
The Shift+Tab combination doesn't work. The problem seems to be related to
the following key binding found in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/us
key <TAB> { [ Tab, ISO_Left_Tab ] };
For some reason, didn't investigate it, the ISO_Left_Tab doesn't emit a
keycode and hence Shift+Tab never reachs the code. May be I'm wrong but my
way to fix that is by defining it like this:
key <TAB> { [ Tab ] };
If you know about a better solution just let me know.
* To quickly disable this driver when starting an application from a terminal
emulator just define DISPLAY variable to nothing. Bash example:
export DISPLAY=
You can achive the same using a .tvrc file and giving a low priority to the
X11 driver. Example:
[TV]
{
[X11]
{
Priority=1
}
}
The bigger the number the more important the driver. The default value is
100, bigger than Linux, XTerm and UNIX drivers.
* Window Manager/Desktop keys: In my opinion no WM/Dekstop should use simple
key combinations for their own purposes interfering with applications.
I don't know how to tell X11 to send the keystrokes to my application instead
of the WM. I know an application can drag the keyboard focus but I also know
it makes quite difficult to debug such an application. If you know about a
way to tell X11 something like: Alt+F1 is mine, send it to me when I have the
focus, please contact me.
My suggestion is to configure your WM/Desktop to use more convenient
keystrokes.
I use Enlightenment as WM and Desktop here is what I do to avoid interference
with TV applications:
a) Debian GNU/Linux Potato: That's version 0.16.3 and I don't know about any
Debian tool to configure the keyboard. So I edited
/usr/share/enlightenment/config/keybindings.cfg changing all the Alt+Fx to
Shift+Alt+Fx (__ALT to __ALT_SHIFT in Function keys).
b) Debian GNU/Linux Woody: That's version 0.16.4. A very nice package called
e16keyedit is available (I think it can be backported to Potato). It makes
easier to redefine the keys used by E.
* The ScreenWidth and ScreenHeight configuration variables are supported.
They are very important because using them the window will be created with
the desired size. If you change the size after initialization the window
resize will be visible and part of the window could become outside the
screen.
* The driver is probably the most complete and flexible of all available
drivers. All the TScreen things are supported:
* Window size.
* Window title.
* Font size, but you must provide the fonts.
* Secondary font.
* Color palette.
* Busy indicator.
* The standard configuration options are supported:
ScreenWidth Columns of the window.
ScreenHeight Rows of the window.
ScreenPalette Color palette, that's a string containing the 16 RGB
values.
"0,0,0,0,0,168,..."
FontWidth Width of the font in pixels.
FontHeight Height of the font in pixels.
LoadSecondaryFont Request a secondary font to the application (must provide a
call back).
AppCP Application encoding.
ScrCP Screen encoding, this should be 885901.
InpCP Input encoding.
Plus the following options:
Font10x20 Selects the 10x20 font instead of 8x16.
HideCursorWhenNoFocus By default enabled
DontResizeToCells Don't resize the window to a cells multiple size if the WM
fails to follow the hints. This helps to avoid problems found
in KDE 3.1 alpha.
InternalBusyCursor When enabled we use our own mouse cursor for it.
UseUpdateThread When this option is enabled the driver updates the
window content even if the TV application is blocking
the CPU. That's very useful when the application
blocks and the window becomes "exposed". If this isn't
enabled X will fill the exposed area with black and
the user won't see the window content until the
application collects events.
It is available using two mechanisms selected at
compilation time:
1) Using setitimer and signals:
It seems to be stable but the TV application must
avoid using setitimer and SIGALRM.
I only tested it for Linux but I'm using concepts I
successfuly used for Solaris in older versions of the
driver.
That's the default compilation option.
2) Using POSIX threads (preemptive)
Only available for Linux.
When enabled the driver uses a separated thread to
collect the "expose" events and update the screen.
That's good because even when the application is
blocking (calling system, performing a long
calculation, etc.) the window can be exposed and the
contents of the screen will be updated (you don't get
a black window). But the problem is that Linux
implementation of POSIX threads is quite poor and
mixing threads with fork/exec doesn't work for big
applications. The driver implements it using
fork/system (system function is "thread protected")
but you must avoid killing your child or the update
thread will most probably die. The driver have a watch
dog timer and if the update thread dies will revert to
manual screen update in less than 2 seconds (>=1s &
<2s aprox.).
* I don't know if anybody can be interested on it, but this driver compiles
and run for Windows. You need to use Cygwin with the XFree86 port installed
and run the applications from X. The result is quite slow, but works.
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