Have I mentioned my short attention span? The other day someone was talking up the netsurf broswer on the Zipit IRC channel and I thought, "Hey, that links browser is nice and all, but I'd really like something that renders the pages a bit cleaner." So off I went on a compiling binge, building all sorts of libs required for netsurf. It actually wasn't all that difficult to compile so I quickly loaded it up on the zipit and tried it out. Looks pretty, but needs a zoom out function because it requires lots and lots of scrolling to see the pages as rendered. And apparently you need a mouse to click on any of the links. Why would anyone create an embedded web browser that doesn't support mouseless browsing?
Now I don't really think a mouse should be required to use a GUI program on a tiny screen like the one on the zipit, but I'd run into this before when playing with some SDL programs. So I grabbed the z2mouse sources, added some key repeat code and built the fake mouse driver for IZ2S. Since they share some device nodes and kernel modules, I tossed it in with the ebindkeys stuff from last week.
Run setup-mouse.sh and then you can toggle the mouse emulation on and off with the Options key. If you also want ebindkeys you should run it before z2mouse, or you'll need to edit the ebindkeys config file to use event1 instead of event0. Because of this minor conflict, I set the Ctrl-Option key combo to terminate the z2mouse. I'm not sure I'm gonna keep that in though because it currently leaves a z2mouse zombie process. I also added an optional command line arg to z2mouse so you can set the key repeat rate for the mouse motion events. The default is 20 motion events per second, but if that's too slow for you you can bump it up a bit. Edit the z2mouse line in setup-mouse.sh and add a number for the event repeat rate, like "z2mouse 40" to double the default rate.
Now since freetype was among the libs I had to build for netsurf I decided to build the SDL_ttf lib and test that with the dgclock program in use on some other small gizmos. You can use it to set the clock when you're not on wifi, and thus without ntp.
I also built fbshot for screen captures and the sdl GUIlib okay program for testing the z2mouse. And meanwhile, I'm actually starting to consider building the framebuffer version of gtk and then maybe xdialog so I can play with pretty scripted GUIs on the Zipit.
testprogs-iz2s.zip
Oh yeah, before I forget... here's the source packages for dgclock and nightsky with the zipit keypad mods and the matching onscreen hint messages.
No comments:
Post a Comment