[Tutor] Does a module for DirectFB exist?

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Roger Merchberger may have mentioned these words:
>DirectFB is short for Direct Frame Buffer, and allows access to a graphical
>frame buffer system in *nix (and I think maybe MacOSX) from a text prompt
>without going through X.
>
>Anyone know of a module to access this through Python? I've googled for it,
>but didn't know if anyone here knew about something along these lines.

Yea, I like talking to myself... This is just fer the archives anywho...

The DirectFB can make use of the SDL which does access the hardware 
directly, and I did find a python module for libSDL, but it looked like it 
hadn't been supported for 3-4 years... according to the webpage, all of the 
functionality of that module was built into a module called PyGame.

PyGame makes direct access to the hardware possible through SDL or DirectFB 
(altho for some reason the DirectFB component couldn't compile on my 
system. :-/ ) and with other SDL modules supports blitting graphics and TTF 
fonts directly to the framebuffer.

It took a little work getting it working, but now I can print text & 
graphics of any size to the framebuffer without needing X to do it (and X 
is kinda limited when you're talking 200-pixel text rendering in an 
xterm... PyGame does it easily as it doesn't have xterm's restraints.).

Anyway, I hope this helps someone else out there...

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers |     Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch at 30below.com          |