X lib support for embedded systems.

[Mart Raudsepp]

On T, 2010-08-10 at 16:15 +0200, Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski wrote:
> > Hello there.
> >
> > I am developing graphics system to one of our touch screen keypad.
> > I planned to use fltk-2.0 to achieve the same.
> > For this I required X11. But as the X11 is very huge, I wanted a slimmed down version of the same.
> > Basically X11 and fltk must occupy not more than 20MB!
> >
> > Fltk basically uses these libraries from X11: -lXext, -lXft, -lXcursor, -lXinerma and -lXi.
> >
> > Can anyone help me in building X11 for my system?
> 
> X windows is not appropriate for embedded platforms ,

I disagree with that sentiment.
X.org works fine on embedded platforms, and is used on such systems with
success.
In fact I have built a system on top of a touch screen with Xorg,
including a full XUL based browser. My storage space limitation was
64MB, so I stopped optimizing for that after I got to a 43MB squashfs
system.

After removing XULrunner and GTK+ and the obviously related thing from
that image and squashfs'ing again, its size becomes 24MB for me, without
any hard trimming at all. With building from scratch, without the less
obvious GTK+ and XULrunner dependencies pulled in, and some slightly
more trimming, I'm confident less than 15MB is quite achievable.

So I do not see why X windows would be inappropriate for embedded
platforms, at least when looking at storage space limitations. For that
the touch screen handling would be very easy from Xorg, and depending on
the graphics chip, might even get considerable graphics acceleration
that is not possible with DirectFB.

That said, I can not offer any free help in building it small. Just
making sure X11 isn't thrown out from the list of possibilities without
a good reason.

> try using directfb 

But sure, DirectFB is an option as well, especially if you are
developing for a platform that provides graphics acceleration on top of
DirectFB, but not on top of X11.

> port of fltk (if it's still working...) or take peek at Xfast and 
> clones...