[Vm-dev] Re: X window handling

[Bert Freudenberg]

On May 31, 2007, at 13:33 , David T. Lewis wrote:

> On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 12:27:41PM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> Hi Ian, David,
>>
>> I think you're the experts for Squeak X window handling ... What
>> would be needed to modify the Unix VM to not open a window until the
>> beDisplay() primitive is called? That's how the Mac and Acorn VMs
>> handle things, making headless operation controllable from the image.
>
> It's not hard. I actually did this once before, change set attached.
> I don't have time to look at it right now to see if it still works
> (probably not since I did it in 1999), but it should not be hard to
> bring it up to date.

That changeset doesn't have much to do with the VM, right? And the  
other VMs do this without changes to the interpreter if I am not  
mistaken.

>> Secondly, what's your estimate of making the host window support
>> work? It is implemented on Win and Mac VMs but not X11 yet. It
>> basically is just some primitives to open, close, resize, and move
>> windows, and display bits, plus the event reporting to the image
>> needs to set a window index field.
>
> It's probably not hard to implement something similar to
> XDisplayControlPlugin for this. When do you need to have it done?

Oh, as soon as possible of course ... I'm working on making Squeak a  
native DBus activity and this is holding me back. I have an FFI-based  
hack to continue my work but FFI is not in the actual OLPC image.

- Bert -