Very nice. Several years ago when the vesa2 directly addressable framebuffer first became available I made a similar effort with FreePascal. I didn't do anything close to as nice as your screenshot. But it was fun constructing a screen array and writing it to the /dev/fb0. I remember Thomas Dickey, the great maintainer of NCurses, lynx, xterm, and other text applications, surprised by framebuffer capabilities. I've never looked at SDL, but I think there are other framebuffer windowing toolkits like it. Another fun thing on the console is to write control characters (man console_codes) to the virtual terminal, which is all NCurses really does. I won't encourage FreePascal, but I like it because I can read it. C variants always looked like chicken scratches to me. With FreePascal they import headers from C libraries to use a lot of existing code. FreePascal has a big sister, Ada. I do think it is a good idea to find alternatives to X for uses like you describe. My recent opensuse 12.2 install removed a lot of non-plug and play X support. Nobody can figure out how to use a serial port mouse anymore, among many other changes. Keep us posted. Joel Longanecker wrote: > Because C# is hard to beat as an applications language. > > The generics are easy to use. No forced type checking. Unicode strings and > a decent string library right off the bat. Under the right conditions, I > can run the same binary under windows and Linux without having to > recompile, and I like that dynamic objects are completely optional, not > forced. > > Mono also has one of the most comprehensive core libraries available. > > In my mind, there are more reasons to use Mono than there are reasons not > to use it. > > > On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:30 AM, Noah Markon<nmarkon at gmail.com> wrote: > >> I'm curious, why Mono? >> >> >> On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:28 AM, Joel Longanecker< >> joel.longanecker at gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Hello fellow area Linux users. >>> >>> This is my first root post on this mailing list, of which I have been a >>> subscriber for a few months, so I hope I get this right. >>> >>> >>> The last few months I've been developing a tool for using Mono at a lower >>> level than it has been in the past. The general use case is to simply put >>> it, is developing kiosk applications with Mono, and deploying them to a >>> minimal Linux system. >>> Right now, I'm using SDL as an interface to communicate with the frame >>> buffer. (At some point, I would like to go lower and talk to the frame >>> buffer and devices exposed in /dev/ without using SDL) The key component to >>> this is exposing the frame-buffer as a System.Drawing.Graphics graphics >>> context. (not using X11) >>> >>> The sample program I currently have written is a basic clock showing some >>> simple effects (Drawing text, arcs, and using transparency and linear >>> gradients) A screenshot of the sample application can be seen running under >>> windows here: >>> https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-rA2-96ysTLA/URB7-luv4lI/AAAAAAAABxg/8BXEABOsrDI/s656/Untitled.png >>> >>> The project is located here, and is published under the BSD license. >>> https://github.com/longjoel/Sunfish >>> >>> Here are some of the potential use cases I see potentially being >>> applicable. >>> >>> * Information Kiosk (weather, status dashboard, rss feed reader) >>> * Car-puting >>> * Industrial workstation (Zebra printers, Barcode scanners, RFID systems, >>> GPIB Instrument communication) >>> >>> Thanks for taking the time to hear me out on this and give some feedback. >>> >>> Thanks! >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >>> >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> >> > > > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
