Re: [ECOS] Microwindows on eCos

[Christian Plessl <cplessl@ee.ethz.ch>]

>What is all this of microwindows?
>
>   Maybe I'm interested on it. Does it allows you to use all the development
>facilities of WindowsCE? Does it works with eCos?

The name Microwindows is leading you to a wrong track. Microwindows is used 
for creating a graphics subsystem i.e. providing support for device 
independent graphics routines and graphic device drivers. The project comes 
in 2 flavors: NanoX and Microwindows. Based on the same libraries providing 
graphic primitives, NanoX provides a X-windows like API whereas 
Microwindows provides a more Windowslike API.

To my knowledge there is no generic graphics device layer in eCos yet. One 
can argue whether the graphics subsystem shall be part of the kernel, like 
in Microsofts Windows, or not, as with Unix running X-windows, where the 
X-server is just an ordinary server application providing its services to 
X-clients.

Microwindows is written that way, that you need to provide a module which 
implements low-level support for graphics i.e. provide a framebuffer device 
driver. If you have written this driver, you should be able to compile 
microwindows and link it to your ecos application.

BTW: Has anybody implemented framebuffer support for VGA cards for the i386 
target? I had a quick look on this, but initialization of the VGA card is 
quite cumbersome especially when running in protected mode. I could not 
find any good documentation on this.

Greetings,
Chris

--
Christian Plessl <cplessl@ee.ethz.ch>