gui_engine project put on-hold

Have been posting about the gui_engine GUI toolkit, for building statically-linked standalone executables that will run in the initramfs (initrd) and render to the Linux framebuffer. See last post:

https://bkhome.org/news/202301/guiengine-fully-converted-to-ttf.html

I even tentatively constructed a little GUI for asking what language the user requires:

I discovered a problem with button placement, reported it:

https://github.com/AlxHnr/gui_engine/issues/4

That should be fixable; however, there is another issue that would be more challenging to implement. I want the UI to be fully operable by keyboard; TAB between widgets, UP-DOWN arrows keys to choose in the drop-down list, ENTER to select.

Mostly because of that latter issue, I have decided to put the project on-hold. I have forked the original gui_engine with my changes so far:

https://github.com/bkauler/gui_engine

This has been very interesting. OK, has soaked up a lot of time, but that's the way it is, time rolls on; already approaching end of January 2023.

I still want to run GUI apps in the initrd; however, there is another way to do it, that I did implement a year or two ago, then abandoned. That was to setup an aufs layer in the initrd, with 'easy.sfs', then chroot onto it and run GUI apps based on gtkdialog. It worked, don't recall why I abandoned it. Will take another look.    

Tags: easy