Free framebuffer software for linux

FBUI is a small, in-kernel graphical user interface for Linux. It permits you to put windows in each framebuffer-based virtual console, to read keyboard input, track a mouse pointer, and respond to typical GUI events. Each process may have more than one window.
- FBUI exists to reduce the software bloat that plagues modern operating systems. It does this by virtue of its being a simple windowing system in the form of a small, 32 kilobyte driver which for some purposes may be quite sufficient. Liberation from bloat is desirable for a number of reasons that I explain in the Philosophy section.
- FBUI exists to assists people who are prohibited from using X Windows because they are using resource-limited platforms such as old computers and embedded devices. On these, X is an impossible burden. However a vanilla framebuffer is often too primitive. FBUI is "just right", and libfbui makes using FBUI even easier to use by providing abstractions and additional functions.
- FBUI exists to correct a flaw in the Linux operating system architecture. The traditional GUI -- X Windows -- is unlike any other subsystem of Linux in that the hardware-accelerated video drivers it uses are located within the X server, outside the kernel. Notice: normally Linux drivers and vital subsystems such as keyboard, USB, filesystem, serial I/O, et cetera are all located inside the kernel. FBUI simply puts the graphics UI driver where it belongs: inside the kernel with all the other drivers.
Main features:
- Unlike X Windows, FBUI supports windows on every virtual console.
- Each program may have more than one window.
- Overlapping windows are currently not supported, but I am adding support for them now.
- There is no concept of parent and child windows.
- Programs can receive raw keystrokes from FBUI which they can then translate to ASCII using a library routine. One process is permitted to have keyboard focus.
- Each process accesses its windows completely independently of all other processes.
- In X, the library has to send all drawing commands to the server process, which puts them in a queue and executes them whenever it has a chance. If the server is busy, or another X application is flooding the queue, then an X application must wait. Not so with FBUI, where the ioctl takes a list of drawing commands that go directly to be executed if the window is visible and irregardless of what any other window is doing. To further ensure the above concurrency is the norm, use of semaphores within FBUI to access common data is made as brief as possible.
- Each virtual console can have its own optional window manager process. But this is not necessary and for instance many programs that Ive written are also designed to run in standalone mode, examples being fbcalc, fbview, fbscribble, and the my FBUI variant of mpeg2decode.
- Im providing a fairly basic window manager fbwm, but current development is centered on fbpm, which is my panel-based window manager.
FBUI offers a sufficient set of drawing routines:
- draw point, line, horizontal line, vertical line, rectangle
- draw text (8-bit)
- window clear, fill rectangle, clear rectangle
- copy area
- put pixels (3-byte RGB, and 4-byte (unsigned long) RGB, and native)
- wait for event
- poll for event
- the window manager process can hide and unhide other processes windows, move, resize, re-expose, and delete windows.
- read point
- FBUI is currently written for 8,16,24, and 32-bit directcolor and truecolor. I am presently adding 4-bpp VGA. (Note : on VESA, Ive done testing for 24 bit only.)
Sample programs provided (I suppose Ive gotten carried away) :
- panel-based window manager (current focus of work)
- conventional window manager
- JPEG+TIFF image viewer
- very simple MPEG playback based on circa 1995 MPEG2 library
- terminal emulator (based on ggiterm)
- load monitor
- "scribbler" drawing program
- analog clock
- simple calculator
- "Start" button program, which invokes fblauncher menu program
- POP3 mail checker
- "to do list" displayer program

DFBSee project is an image viewer and video player for the Linux framebuffer that uses DirectFB.
Due to the use of hardware acceleration through DirectFB, it provides very fast and smooth zooming.
The files supported at this moment are PNG, JPEG, GIF and AVI, MPEG or a Video4Linux video device.
For video playback it is highly recommened that you use a bitdepth 16bit on your framebuffer device. Make sure that the first mode listed in /etc/fb.modes has at least 15bpp.
The man-page for dfbsee describes all available command-line options and how to use the program when it is running.
Enhancements:
- updated for 0.9.15
- suppress display of the "Loading..." message in slide-show mode
- compile the user interface elements into the application instead of using external PNG images.
- improved error reporting

DirectFB is a thin library that provides developers with hardware graphics acceleration, input device handling and abstraction, integrated windowing system with support for translucent windows and multiple display layers on top of the Linux Framebuffer Device.
DirectFB project is a complete hardware abstraction layer with software fallbacks for every graphics operation that is not supported by the underlying hardware. DirectFB adds graphical power to embedded systems and sets a new standard for graphics under Linux.
Main features:
- Rectangle filling/drawing
- Triangle filling/drawing
- Line drawing
- Flat shaded triangles
- Simple blitting
- Stretched blitting
- Textured triangles (perspective correct)
- Blending with an alphachannel (per pixel alpha)
- Blending with an alpha factor (alpha modulation)
- Nine source and destination blend functions
- Porter/Duff rules are supported
- Premultiplied alpha supported
- Colorized blitting (color modulation)
- Source color keying
- Destination color keying
Enhancements:
The time has come
Let it all begin,
Start the future,
Head forward and
Make it happen
This is for you!

SDL_mixer is a sample multi-channel audio mixer library. SDL_mixer supports any number of simultaneously playing channels of 16 bit stereo audio, plus a single channel of music, mixed by the popular MikMod MOD, Timidity MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, and SMPEG MP3 libraries.

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power."

Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Windows, BeOS, MacOS Classic, MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. There is also code, but no official support, for Windows CE, AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, NetBSD, AIX, OSF/Tru64, RISC OS, and SymbianOS.

SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, Java, Lua, ML, Perl, PHP, Pike, Python, and Ruby.

Fim (Fbi IMproved) aims to be a highly customizable and scriptable image viewer targeted at the users who are confortable with software like the Vim text editor or the Mutt mail user agent.
The application is based on the Fbi image viewer and works in the Linux framebuffer console (it is not an X program). It features the ability to filter the list of images with regular expressions, Vim-like autocommands, command line autocompletion and history, completely customizable key bindings, external/internal scriptability, and much more.
Main features:
- interactive (default) vs command line mode
- every possible internal action has a textual command name
- on-screen debug and information console in command mode
- command line history
- command line tab-based command autocompletion (thanks to the readline)
- command line command autocompletion (optional)
- key-action binding, with SHIFT and CONTROL key combinations
- simple if-while scriptability, with integer,float,and string variables and arithmetic evaluation
- command aliases support (macros)
- event autocommands (in Vims autocmd style)
- regular expressions to enrich autocommand behaviour
- configuration (initialization) file support
- usable builtin default configuration
- wrapper script to convert pdf,ps,eps,dvi,cbr(rar),cbz(zip),tar,tar.gz,tgz
- contents into images and display with Fim
- index based goto
- regular expressions (on filename) based goto
- stuff usual for an image viewer (scale, pan, etc..)
- stuff (un)usual for an image viewer (setting scale factor, auto width scale,
- auto heigth scale, marking of interesting files, sorting of files in the
- list, recording/replaying of sessions, repeat last action )
- script file execution
- system call
- pipe with some input program
- these features could be enabled or disabled at compile time editing the Makefile

FBZX is a Sinclair Spectrum emulator, designed to work at full screen using the FrameBuffer.
Main features:
- emulates acurately the Original spectrum (both issue 2 and issue 3), the classic 128K, the Amstrad Plus 2 and the Amstrad Plus 2A. This include screen, keyboard and sound (both speaker and AY-3-8912 chip).
- Screen emulation is extremely acurate, so it can emulate border efects and even atribute efects.
- Supports Z80 snapshots, both loading and saving.
- Supports TAP (both read and write) and TZX (only read) tape files, supporting normal speed loading and fast speed loading.
- Emulates joysticks: kempston, cursor and sinclair.
- Emulates the Interface I and Microdrive.
- Is based in the great Z80 emulator created by Marat Fayzullin.
- Is distributed under GPL license (except the Z80 core, that cant be commercially distributed. See details in the homepage of Marat Fayzullin or in the documentation).

Splack Linux is Slackware for Sparc.

Splack supports all Sun4c, Sun4d, and Sun4m hardware.

Most Sun4U (Ultrasparc) machines are supported, but the more modern SunBlade and SunFire systems are not supported in the 2.2.20 kernel.

As a workaround you may be able to move the boot disk to a supported UltraSparc machine, install Splack 8.0, upgrade to Splack-current, and build a 2.4.27 or later kernel.

Sun4m SMP requires kernel 2.4.27 or later. Sun4d SMP requires 2.4.27 plus patches, the patches should be included in 2.4.28. Sun4d SMP will not work with serial console: install a framebuffer, monitor, and keyboard.

Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a 100% free CD bootable Linux distribution aimed specifically at offline operations for Windows and Linux systems such as rescue, repair, password resets and cloning, with the ability to update itself.
It has custom tools to easily recover data such as deleted files, clone Windows installations over the network, perform antivirus sweeps with 2 different antivirus products, reset windows passwords, read AND write on NTFS partitions, edit
partition layout and much much more.
Trinity Rescue Kit 3.1 is the evolved version of 3.0 and a complete rewrite of version 1.1 and the unfinished 2.0. It s mostly based on Mandrake 10.2 (Mandriva 2005) binaries and heavily adapted startup scripts.
What s new since 3.0?
- self update capability: TRK now has a script that will download/search all non-GPL
licensed software, like the Microsoft ntfs
drivers or F-prot. It will also update antivirus definitions for F-prot and Clamav.
Afterwards, it will recreate itself as a new iso
file which you can burn again to CD
- new version of captive-ntfs, using the latest XP SP2 drivers and LUFS
- clamav 0.88-1
- mkisofs, cdrecord, pico, cfdisk
- eject CD (was bug in build 204) and powerdown on halt
What s new since 1.1 (and 2.0):
- more hardware support:
kernel 2.6.14.3 with most default options left on, so all important hardware like
disc controllers and network cards are supported, even SATA disks, USB storage and gigabit ethernet. Also patched with lufs (for ntfs support) and bootsplash (background graphics)
- better network capability: besides all common network client tools, you can also run a secure shell server for remote access or TRK to TRK file copies
- run completely from memory: provided you have at least 192Mb of ram, you can run TRK from memory and eject the CD once it has booted, giving you the ability to mount other CDs
- vesa framebuffer support: TRK now has limited graphical support thanks to kernel
builtin framebuffer support.
- qtparted: the famous PQMagic clone. Partition editing never been this easy thanks to the graphical interface this tool uses (via framebuffer)
- configure your LAN to be "TRK 3 compliant": you can change the way a TRK behaves by adding an otherwise unused parameter to your DHCP server to point to a webserver where you keep specific configuration data for your TRK such as proxy settings or complete scripts with which you can do anything you want
- run scripts from a local computer by searching for /.trk/trklocal.conf
- full NTFS write support thanks to the captive ntfs project by Jan Kratochvil.
- more NTFS write support with the NTFS Fuse driver.
- Secure Shell server: let a user boot from TRK, enter a new password for root and
connect to TRK remotely
Featuring home brewed scripts, new and improved:
- updatetrk (since 3.1): updates TRK with ntfs drivers, F-prot + definitions and
Clamav definitions. When the script is run without arguments, it looks for a Windows pagefile.sys, creates a loopback filesystem on it and creates TRK from there. Afterwards it copies the new isofile to C: emp, from where you can burn it to CD again
- clonexp: script that uses ntfsclone to perform copies of ntfs filesystems between
two computers each running their copy of Trinity Rescue Kit 3.1. One PC copies his Windows installation over the network to another PC running a TRK 3.1 with a secure shell server enabled. An easy way to clone Windows installations or recover as much as you can from a dying disk. Run it either interactively or from a single commandline
- winpass: does the same thing as in TRK 1.1, searches for all local Windows
installations, runs chntpw on your SAM file and resets the password. It now also handles Windows on FAT32 correctly and uses the safe ntfs driver from the Linux kernel, so it works even without captive support
- regedit: is actually the same as winpass, but starts chntpw in interactive mode and allows you to edit a Windows registry
- virusscan: completely rewritten,this script now has two different engines: the default is to run with the GNU Clamav antivirus which is free for everyone. This is a very good scanner, but the drawback is that it can only detect virus infected files, not clean them. So the only option is to delete them, where most of the time the file is the complete virus. But just to be sure we don t delete anything valuable, a quarantined backup is being made first. The other part of the script uses the free-for-home-users F-prot. F-prot itself is not included in TRK but it gets downloaded from their site. F-prot DOES have the ability to disinfect files if necessary.
- ntfsundeleteall: also completely rewritten, ntfsundeleteall, a wrapper for
ntfsundelete now recovers deleted files from an NTFS volume but it gives you the ability to add a recoverability percentage to the commandline. Since it only recovers files and not directories, sometimes you would have double filenames. This has been countered by adding the inode of the file at the beginning of the filename, so recoverability is 100% within the possibilities of ntfsundelete
More utils:
- links: simple webbrowser which runs in framebuffer graphical mode. Handy to go and read some reference docs on the Internet
- ftp and lftp
- ssh and scp
- ms-sys: This program is used to create Microsoft compatible boot records. It is able to do the same as Microsoft "fdisk /mbr" to a hard disk. It is also able to do the same as Microsoft "sys d:" to a floppy or FAT partition except that it does not copy any system files, only the boot record is written.
- Reiserfs tools
- ext2/ext3 tools
- ntfsprogs
- dosfs tools
- tcpdump, nmap and netcat
- mdadm for offline raid configuration
- burn, a utility that stresses your CPU
- samba client: mount windows shares over the network
- shred: erase a harddisk until its unrecoverable even by magnetic resonance recovery
- fatback: undelete files from fat filesystems
- TestDisk: Tool to check and undelete partition, works with most common partitions
- PhotoRec: File and pictures recovery. PhotoRec has been created to recover pictures from digital camera memory and it has been extended to recover lost files from harddisk (List of known files). PhotoRec is safe to use, it will never attempt to write to the drive or memory support you are about to recover from. Recovered files are instead written in the directory from where you are running the PhotoRec program.
- pico text editor
- mkisofs and cdrecord
- perl 5
Enhancements:
- Very extensive and complete documentation.
- 2 more virus scan engines: Grisoft AVG and BitDefender.
- ntfs-3g has full and fast read/write support for NTFS drives.
- Bootable from a USB stick and over PXE.
- An integrated Samba file server.
- LVM support.
- Kernel 2.6.19.2 and hwdata 0.191-1.
- Menu-based graphical startup.
- Tools to migrate TRK from CD to USB and back to an ISO file if desired.
- Bridging capabilities.
- Full proxy server support: a script called "setproxy" can prompt you for your networks proxy parameters, allowing you to access the internet and update your TRK.