Less X?

[DavidS]

I am now using Raspbian Linux as my primary OS. Needs that RISC OS can not currently meet and are beyond my ability to compensate for at this time, have caused me to make friends with Raspbian. i would like to reduce the need for X as much as reasonable,.

While I do like where X is now, I would like to use X less than I currently do.

So I am looking for some programs, where possible and appropriate mouse driven is preferable.

As many of these require graphics output, it does not matter if the output is Linux FB, DirectFB, SDL, or GL. Just so long as it does not require X.

As such I would like to know what applications are available, in the Raspbian repo, in a few areas:
1 Graphical Web Browsers: Any decent graphical HTML5 web browsers.

2 Graphics Editing/Viewing Programs: Picture viewers, Paint programs, Draw Programs, etc.

3: 3D Modeling Applictions: CAD type, as well as simple 3D modelers. Also OBJ/STL viewers.

4: Slicer Documentation: Most g-code slicers for 3D printing can be run command line, though the documentation tends to be sparse, especially as quick references go (the type of reference for when you forget a detail).

5: WISIWIG Word Processing: Preferably with as good of support for standard document formats as possible.

6: Multimedia Players: I know about omxplayer, VLC, and ffplay. I am looking for what others there are that do NOT need X. Also good background music players.

7 Multimedia editing: I know of the command line tools like the ffmpeg suite, though I would like to find some that have a mouse driven UI.

I understand that some of what I am looking for may not be available. That is OK, I am just looking to do as much as possible without X.

[Heater]

None that I know of.

Although I know it is possible to create GUI apps using Qt that render to the frame buffer directly, including hardware accelerated 3D, done that.

It would be great if a browser or Electron could render to the FB.

[DarkPlatinum]

2 Graphics Editing/Viewing Programs: Picture viewers, Paint programs, Draw Programs, etc.



6: Multimedia Players: I know about omxplayer, VLC, and ffplay. I am looking for what others there are that do NOT need X. Also good background music players.


I understand that some of what I am looking for may not be available. That is OK, I am just looking to do as much as possible without X.

All these application im about to say are available for Raspbian (i think thats what your asking for)

2.) GIMP

6.) Music player: Banshee, multimedia player: MPV media player, KODI, smplayer (for me it don't work, idk what i did to it)

[DavidS]

2 Graphics Editing/Viewing Programs: Picture viewers, Paint programs, Draw Programs, etc.



6: Multimedia Players: I know about omxplayer, VLC, and ffplay. I am looking for what others there are that do NOT need X. Also good background music players.


I understand that some of what I am looking for may not be available. That is OK, I am just looking to do as much as possible without X.

All these application im about to say are available for Raspbian (i think thats what your asking for)

2.) GIMP

How do you run that without X?

6.) Music player: Banshee, multimedia player: MPV media player, KODI, smplayer (for me it don't work, idk what i did to it)

I think most of those need X. Do you know something I do not?

[DavidS]

None that I know of.

Although I know it is possible to create GUI apps using Qt that render to the frame buffer directly, including hardware accelerated 3D, done that.

It would be great if a browser or Electron could render to the FB.

Thank you.

I know there was once mention of an HTML5 Graphical Web Browser, though I am not having any luck finding it.

It would be nice if there were at least as good of graphical FrameBuffer programs for Linux as there currently are for DOS (been thinking about DOS more lately). At least for DOS every single one of the categories is covered except for a sufficient web browser.

[DarkPlatinum]

2 Graphics Editing/Viewing Programs: Picture viewers, Paint programs, Draw Programs, etc.



6: Multimedia Players: I know about omxplayer, VLC, and ffplay. I am looking for what others there are that do NOT need X. Also good background music players.


I understand that some of what I am looking for may not be available. That is OK, I am just looking to do as much as possible without X.

All these application im about to say are available for Raspbian (i think thats what your asking for)

2.) GIMP

How do you run that without X?

6.) Music player: Banshee, multimedia player: MPV media player, KODI, smplayer (for me it don't work, idk what i did to it)

I think most of those need X. Do you know something I do not?

Oh, I thought you were just asking for normal Raspbian applications. No I am sorry, I dont know how to run these without X/Raspbian Lite. Are you sure you can edit images, etc without X? May I also ask what you need this for?

[fanoush]

While I do like where X is now, I would like to use X less than I currently do.

Why? What do you expect to gain from that? What problem are you trying to solve? Less memory usage? Faster startup? Speed of screen updates?
Most probably it is not X itself that is the issue and with framebuffer apps of similar complexity and feature set (web browser, ...) the result might be same or worse than with X. X runs quite well on devices with 64MB RAM and 200MHz CPU (like e.g. Nokia N770 - it even included rich gtk2 based environment)

Or if one wants the real retro feeling there is plenty of old stuff like twm or fvwm window manager with plain xterm or rxvt, xv image viewer ...

Or if you insist check e.g. this http://macrofig.blogspot.com/ that guy ported lot of framebuffer apps to Zipit Z2 which is linux device with 32MB RAM and 320x240 display.

[DavidS]

While I do like where X is now, I would like to use X less than I currently do.

Why? What do you expect to gain from that? What problem are you trying to solve? Less memory usage? Faster startup? Speed of screen updates?

None of those. Startup is quite fast enough, I have plenty of memory left (and I have swap completely disabled), screen updates are fast enough.

Not attempting to solve a problem. It is just nice to be able to use any OS as much as possible without the GUI. It is kind of like setting up RISC OS to run without the WIMP, or ReactOS (or Windows) to run without the GUI, or running DOS instead of Windows 9x, or running TOS without GEM, etc. It has nothing to do with how things run, just how much fun you have doing things

Most probably it is not X itself that is the issue and with framebuffer apps of similar complexity and feature set (web browser, ...) the result might be same or worse than with X. X runs quite well on devices with 64MB RAM and 200MHz CPU (like e.g. Nokia N770 - it even included rich gtk2 based environment)

Do not have any problems to solve. Everything runs well, just want to do it without X.

Or if one wants the real retro feeling there is plenty of old stuff like twm or fvwm window manager with plain xterm or rxvt, xv image viewer ...

I use bash for my shell. If I wanted to have a real retro feel I would port sh from ancient Unix .

Or if you insist check e.g. this http://macrofig.blogspot.com/ that guy ported lot of framebuffer apps to Zipit Z2 which is linux device with 32MB RAM and 320x240 display.

I
Thank you i shall look through that blog.

Still what was the HTML5 web browser that was mentioned on these forums that runs without X using the FrameBuffer?

[ejolson]

Not attempting to solve a problem. It is just nice to be able to use any OS as much as possible without the GUI.

I think many people find mouse-based graphical user interfaces slow and tedious.

X is surprisingly flexible. Rather than throwing out all applications that work with X, some people have created tiling window managers such as Ratpoison and others. At the same time, I have been happily using fvwm with a heavily customised configuration file for some time.

[Heater]

Why?

Sometimes there is the nagging feeling that there is just too much stuff, too many layers of code between what I want to do and the hardware it runs on.

One of my dreams is a version of Chrome or Firefox that can render itself directly to the frame buffer. No X in the middle. In fact it would be neat to be able to throw away most of the junk that runs on a typical Linux system and boot straight into the browser.

Of course Google had this dream as well. It's called a Chrome book.

Now, if Chrome could render to the FB then so could Electron. Then we would have a means to create applications.

This sort of capability would be great for single use machines that are dedicated to only ever running one application.

Edit: Also WebOS is the result of a similar dream. http://webosose.org/develop/architecture/

Hey, WebOS has been open sourced this year and it targets the Raspberry Pi. I had not noticed anyone picking up on that around here.

[ejolson]

One of my dreams is a version of Chrome or Firefox that can render itself directly to the frame buffer. No X in the middle.

As far I understand, neither vendors, open-source developers nor vendor-supported open-source developers want to maintain multiple drivers for multiple operating systems. That one graphics driver for Linux is typically optimized for the X Window System, probably because of popularity and versatility. A typical example of such a driver is the NVIDIA proprietary driver, but even the more modular AMD open source drivers are clearly targeted for use with X.

The situation with Raspberry Pi and other single board computers is not so straightforward, due to the fact that the most prevalent type of Linux running on ARM is Android. For example, it apparently seemed expedient to bypass traditional X originally and create an optimised version of Wayand for the Pi. However, at this point Wayand may represent a similar return on investment as the Epiphany browser.

Strangely, the only Unix-like operating system for which the X Window System does not serve as the main graphical user interface is Mac OS X. A more descriptive name would have been Mac OS Quartz. I wonder if the reappropriation of the letter X by Apple for something completely different than understood by the rest of the Unix community was intentional.

Back on topic, since X makes it easy to replace the window manager with something that radically changes the user interface, it is not such a bad choice for a single application platform, embedded system or even a mouseless retro style.

[Gavinmc42]

I have been using Gentoo64 on Pi3B+'s which is using the latest OpenGL driver.
For 3D - Blender for Artists which is Blender with an easy to learn UI which also uses OpenGL.
FreeCAD for other STL stuff.

OpenGL can run without X11, same with OpenVG/GLES.
X11 does the Windowing stuff?
So do it without Windowing, ie full screen but with something like Alt F1-F7 Desktop swapping?
Separate Framebuffer memory for each Desktop?
Android sort of does that, side swipe to change screens.

I did like the Fifth browser when I had it working in TinyCore.
Gentoo64 is using the Firefox browser which seems much better than most.
This is based the Servo engine compiled in Rust.
Browser without X11? Webkit with Xvfb?

Been having some fun with Paul's OMX stuff in baremetal, should not be too hard to make a GUI for it?
https://github.com/pjde-ultibo/openmax
I had a look at Kodi? Kodi-fbdev?
But there must be a OpenVG media GUI somewhere?

I think ImagemagicK works command line?
Yep, pick your own UI and language - https://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php
Gimp uses Imagemagick?

For a Text Editor I have been tending towards HTML5 text editing with hardware accelerated rendering.
Basically the core of a Browser.
There was a WYSIWYG HTML editor I found that ran on Pi Ubuntu Mate, forgot the name

[k-pi]

You'll probably just have to use command line programs for the bulk of what you want.

mc = file manager, & much more, editor included.

wordgrinder = wordprocessing.

fbi = Image viewer.

mpg123 = music file player, (can be used in conjunction with mc).

moc = music player.

image magic = graphics manipulation.

vi(m) = full featured editor.

screen/tmux = multiple terminals.

sc = spreadsheet calculator.

dc = reverse notation calculator.

pine = email program.

Just some that I use, or have used in the past.

Web browsers are a bigger problem, not worth the hassle.

[bensimmo]

Edit: Also WebOS is the result of a similar dream. http://webosose.org/develop/architecture/

Hey, WebOS has been open sourced this year and it targets the Raspberry Pi. I had not noticed anyone picking up on that around here.

Must have been on holiday.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/webos ... pberry-pi/

And various (ok just a couple) forum posts.

[fruitoftheloom]

Edit: Also WebOS is the result of a similar dream. http://webosose.org/develop/architecture/

Hey, WebOS has been open sourced this year and it targets the Raspberry Pi. I had not noticed anyone picking up on that around here.

Must have been on holiday.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/webos ... pberry-pi/

And various (ok just a couple) forum posts.

WebOS was discussed in 2011

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... hp?p=17582

Whilst LuneOS was discussed in 2015

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... p?p=836929

Re-inventing wheels, but they are still round !

[fruitoftheloom]

You'll probably just have to use command line programs for the bulk of what you want.

mc = file manager, & much more, editor included.

wordgrinder = wordprocessing.

fbi = Image viewer.

mpg123 = music file player, (can be used in conjunction with mc).

moc = music player.

image magic = graphics manipulation.

vi(m) = full featured editor.

screen/tmux = multiple terminals.

sc = spreadsheet calculator.

dc = reverse notation calculator.

pine = email program.

Just some that I use, or have used in the past.

Web browsers are a bigger problem, not worth the hassle.

Links2 Web Browser

https://packages.debian.org/stretch/links2

[Heater]

Yeah, somehow I missed that.

So I tried to build a WebOS image last night on my Debian machine. The build failed with some very obscure error message.

Googling around I find the image build is very fussy and only supported to work on some LTS release of Ubuntu. So that is dead in the water till they get their act together.

Perhaps I'll try again in half a year if someone reminds me and WebOS is still around.

[Heater]

fruitoftheloom,

I found those old posts re: WebOS.

What a history, limping along from Palm to HP to LG.

I get the impression that this open source release is somewhat different from the 2011 open sourcing effort.

[fruitoftheloom]

fruitoftheloom,

I found those old posts re: WebOS.

What a history, limping along from Palm to HP to LG.

I get the impression that this open source release is somewhat different from the 2011 open sourcing effort.

It ranks alongside Android and ChromeOS as a great wish not achieved