OSD (on screen display) w/o X

[Chinasaur]

Hey guys, I posted this originally into "What Software?", but it turned into a dev thread. Haven't gotten much interest it seems, but thought I'd try cross-posting; hope thats okay.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=17101

[elatllat]

like say ncmpc?
or xbmc? (bloatware but it works)

[Chinasaur]

Kind of, but yeah not so heavy as XBMC (requires X?) and not just a terminal client or interactive client like mpc or ncmpc. What I wanted was something that can run in the background and call "mpc current" and then display the result on screen in large letters regardless of what else was going on in the terminal. So like toast notification without X.

I hacked together something that basically does this, based on the hello_font example program; see other thread. It can be used as a general OSD, i.e. takes generic input. I'm working on making the vgft and vgfont libraries more flexible now, and maybe adding more graphical features. Most toast notification programs will also show an icon if you want, so maybe that will be a goal.

[hdhaenens]

Hello,

I'm looking for a simular solution. Did you finish the project? Do you want to share your solution?

Thanks

Regards,

Henk

[Chinasaur]

I did write a basic program: https://github.com/chinasaur/poptart . I haven't tested it lately, but should still work unless the RasPi firmware changed out from under it. I'll take a look soon to confirm still working.

Another option you might consider is to run an X program in a minimal window manager like matchbox. Here's some info I wrote up a while back; scroll down to section on running without a desktop window manager: https://github.com/MobilityLab/TransitS ... spberry-Pi .