Layers and Layers (revisited)

Yet another of my long term goals for the zipit is to get FLTK working so I can build the Dillo browser, maybe murgaLua, and play with some light embedded GUI development.  FLTK applications have worked out quite well on some of the smaller linux distros like TinyCore and Puppy Linux.  So perhaps some of that good stuff could be squeezed onto the zipit.

Recently someone built FLTK 1.3 on Nano-X on DOS, so I figured if that was now possible, then a zipit port ought to be workable as well.  I followed some of the directions from the DOS port, and eventually figured out which options to select in the MicroWindows config file to convince Nano-X to build and run on the zipit.  The mouse was a bit tricky, but I eventually figured out the fake z2mouse was emulating a PS2 serial mouse, so all I had to do was softlink /dev/input/mice to the /dev/mouse device Nano-X was expecting, and it worked.  I still don't know exactly what to do about all the font options, but so far I haven't needed to sort that out just yet.

Now we all know by now that the framebuffer device on the zipit is actually a 240x320 pixel LCD oriented at a 90 degrees right rotation from the keyboard.  This must be accounted for whenever you want to display something on the screen.  Nano-X has a handy -L command line option to rotate the screen to the left for 320x240 pixels aligned with the keyboard.  But it also rotates the mouse coordinates, making the pointer 90 degrees off.  However, I found the spot in the Nano-X code where the mouse coords come in from all the various drivers.  So I added a 3 line zipit patch to rotate them 90 degrees to the right to match the real orientation of the screen.  And they remain matched up when the both the screen and the mouse are rotated by the -L command line option.  Nice!


I gotta revisit DirectFB and try to apply a similar mouse fix.  Especially now that I've got glinks running properly on SDL instead of DirectFB.  That leaves me completely free to discard the broken IZ2S DirectFB libs and start again from scratch.

I may also revisit the z2mouse driver itself.  The more I use it, the more I'm convinced that maybe the left mouse button should be on the play key instead of the center of the dpad.  It's nice for pointing and clicking to have all the functionality right on the dpad, with the lesser used center and right buttons off to the left on the play and stop keys.  But dragging anything takes 2 fingers, and it's really hard to get both of them in the confined space of the dpad.  So I'm thinking now that maybe the left and right buttons do most of the dragging work, so they should be moved off to the side of the dpad on the play and stop keys.  That leaves the center of the dpad for the center mouse button.  Easy to remember and it doesn't cross my fingers up dragging things around, or highlighting text.

Anyhow, FLTK seems to work.  Now I gotta just find me some FLTK apps to tinker with that work well in 320x240, or I suppose 240x320 if they don't need the keyboard.  These look pretty good, for example.  Perhaps eigenmath?  Or alsamixergui?