Considering uGFX

I posted about a first hands-on with LittlevGL:

http://bkhome.org/news/201808/tentative-first-step-framebuffer-with-littlevgl.html

In an earlier post, there is a list of contenders for creating GUI apps that will run on the Linux framebuffer:

http://bkhome.org/news/201808/gui-creation-for-the-linux-framebuffer.html

...in that post, I mentioned µGFX. Yeah, looks good. The intention now, is to have a hands-on with µGFX.

µGFX is commercial, open-source, free for personal and educational use. I am OK with that. In fact, this kind of model might be more likely to stick around into the future (unless the company gets bought by Microsoft, and then dies -- that's a joke!). Also likely to be more sophisticated and polished that a totally freebie product.

One thing that did put me off initially, is that it only generates 32-bit executables. As I am currently working with 64-bit builds of Easy and Quirky, without any 32-bit libraries, this is a problem. Well, that applies to my "Pyro" series, which is compiled from source in my fork of OpenEmbedded.

There is Quirky Xerus 8.6, built with Ubuntu DEBs, and that does have 32-bit libs available, however, I am moving away from that, in future will likely focus on the Pyro series.

Does it matter that executables are 32-bit? Actually, no, as my planned usage is to create static executables, and they will work on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, no shared libraries required. In which case, there is an advantage to building 32-bit executables.

The easiest platform (for me) on which to evaluate µGFX will be a i686 build of EasyOS, Pyro series. Compiling it right now. Might even release it, for those who still need a 32-bit x86 distro.

Another preliminary impression of µGFX is of it's maturity and capability -- the new beta 0.2 of µGFX-Studio is written using µGFX libraries. It is a drag-and-drop GUI designer. This uses SDL2 and will run on the desktop. Here is a forum thread:

https://community.ugfx.io/topic/843-ugfx-studio-v020-beta/

A comment about SDL2: it uses OpenGL for rendering, cannot use the Linux framebuffer. SDL1 can use the framebuffer. Unfortunate!

There is an active user community:

https://community.ugfx.io/

The online documentation looks good:

https://wiki.ugfx.io/

https://api.ugfx.io/

Project homepage:

https://ugfx.io/

Looks good, keen to try it! 

Tags: linux