Friday, September 15, 2006

Getting Firefox to build

Well, I've got a GTK2 library to build without any X source (and without any functionality, the ROLF backend consists of placeholders for the time being), and I want to get Firefox to build on top of that. It's not as easy as I'd like, the X library headers seem to get pulled in whether or not it's using X. It's been a decade since I had anything to do with COM, and there seems to be about 2000 COM interfaces in the tree. When I've had a look through them, hopefully I'll be able to identify which libraries need to be patched.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Still here

I'm not posting more often because (a) nobody's looking and (b) I have to reboot into Knoppix and use Mozilla Firefox to post. My base system is Linux From Scratch, this time built using ALFS, which doesn't do a lot, but I want to ensure that there are as few dependencies as possible for the basic system.

The mplayer patch seems to work quite well with moderate sized videos (but needs DVD movies scaled down to a half original to be watchable).

Next (after hunting down the show-stopper that meant I had to do this re-boot), I plan to install GDK in a special user's home directory and see what I can achieve with SVG and, possibly, some simple Gnome applications.

If anyone is interested in having a copy of the source code, I can provide it via e-mail, if anyone wants to request it from simon dot willcocks at t-online dot de. The code will be released as (L)GPL. The whole lot is 12k lines of code, 360K uncompressed (78K compressed), plus a 528 line patch to MPlayer-1.0pre8.

Friday, September 01, 2006

MPlayer

Well, I gave up on SVG for the time being and decided to patch MPlayer to display movies using ROLF instead.

It's simply a matter of adding a new Video Out driver that opens a window and displays each frame as it comes, detatching from the WIMP while the next frame is built so that other windows can do stuff. The MPlayer software even takes care of the YUV to RGB translation transparently. That took a couple of days, the last two days have been spent updating my LFS system to get proper audio (and a 2.6 kernel). I've got to do that more often, so I don't forget how it works!