Low-overhead GUI toolkit for Linux w/o X11?

[David Boddie]

On Sat Nov 3 20:45:54 CET 2007, Grant Edwards wrote:

> I'm looking for GUI toolkits that work with directly with the
> Linux frambuffer (no X11).  It's an embedded device with
> limited resources, and getting X out of the picture would be a
> big plus.
> 
> The toolkit needs to be free and open-source.
> 
> So far, I've found two options that will work without X11:
> 
>  1) QTopia (nee QT/Embedded).  I assume that I can probably get
>     PyQT to work with the embedded version of QT?

Qtopia Core (formerly known as Qt/Embedded) should be fairly painless to get
working, though the embedded-specific features aren't supported by a plain
PyQt4 build.

However, it is possible to get bindings for it up and running - I've done it
twice for different versions of Qtopia Core

  http://www.diotavelli.net/PyQtWiki/PyQt4_on_the_Qtopia_Greenphone

so it should be possible to get something working for the latest version.

You don't really have to worry too much about having all the bells and
whistles wrapped for use from Python, anyway.

>  2) PySDL or PyGame. I'm not really sure what the differences
>     are between those two.  The latter seems to be a little
>     more active.  Are there any traditional GUI "widgets"
>     available for these two?

PyGame is definitely more visible than PySDL. You might find something you
can use in the list of libraries for PyGame:

  http://www.pygame.org/tags/libraries

There's also a list of "gui" tagged projects:

  http://www.pygame.org/tags/gui

> Google found me this thread from a few years ago:

[...]

> Which mentions the same two choices and confirms that PyQt at
> worked at one time with Qt/E (which would lead one to believe
> it could be made to work with QTopia).

I guess I should be pushing my patches for PyQt4 back upstream, or at least
publishing them somewhere. I suppose it would also be useful if I looked at
making them work with a recent version of PyQt4 and made sure that any new
widgets in Qtopia Core 4.3 are handled by the configuration system. This
lets you exclude features you don't need in order to reduce library sizes.

If you're interested in using PyQt4, I'll add an item for these changes near
the top of my "to do" list. If not, I'll probably get around to doing it,
but it might not happen soon.

David