Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Thomas Wood]

On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 20:57 +0100, thomas.cooksey at bt.com wrote:

> [...] I mentioned earlier that cairo uses Xrender to copy & compose
> rasterized graphics onto the screen. Some graphics hardware can
> accelerate some of the XRender operations, however, in X.org it seems
> the current driver model makes that very difficult, resulting in
> limited acceleration and thus slowness (different drivers accelerate
> different XRender operations). To fix that, Glitz was created to allow
> cairo to render to a GL context and use the 3D hardware to accelerate
> the composition, sidestepping XRender completely.

And there are already plans for someone to do the necessary XRender
coding to support GTA02.

> 
> Lets look at OpenMoko's rendering path. Thomas Wood mentioned
> yesterday, OpenMoko currently uses a pixmap based theme engine. The
> pixmaps are (IMO) beautiful. They are all shiny and curved and have a
> nice orange-black gradient. While they look great, they are slow as
> the pixmaps need to be copied from off-screen buffers to the frame
> buffer. My guess is that's why the OpenMoko interface is a bit slugish
> (only a guess, I suspect others on this list know a lot more about
> this than I do!). Thomas mentioned yesterday that the new theme engine
> for OpenMoko used XLib (though GDK) rather than pixmaps or cairo.
> That's going to be much faster because there are no big copies
> involved. However, I don't understand how using XLib is going to
> produce the same graphical results. There's no facility for doing
> gradients or shadows or anything pretty? 

Because coding simple gradients is trivial and I've already done it :-)

The code for the Moko GTK+ engine is already available in SVN and once
it's more fully featured I will be posting screenshots on my blog.

All in all, the great thing about OpenMoko and the Neo1973 is that
you're free to choose whatever path you wish to take. If you want to use
Qtopia on your Neo1973 then you are more than welcome to do so! There
are many many different Linux distributions and probably almost as many
graphical user interface projects. One of the great things about the
Free Software philosophy is choice and the Neo1973 is one of the first
phones that gives you that ability to choose every single bit of
software that you use on it.


Regards,

Thomas


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