Free vga software for linux

GAG (initials, in spanish, of Graphical Boot Manager) is a Boot Manager program. GAGs loaded when the computer is turned on and allows you to choose the operating system you want to use.
Main features:
- Allows boot of up to 9 different operating systems.
- It can boot operating systems installed in primary and extended partitions on any available hard disk.
- Can be installed from nearly all operating systems.
- GAG doesnt need its own partition. It installs itself in the first track of the hard disk, wich is reserved for these kinds of programs. It can also be instaled on a floppy disk, without using the hard disk.
- It has a timer to boot a default operating system (selectable by the user).
- The configuration menu can be protected with a password.
- The program works in graphic mode (needs a VGA or better graphic card), and has a lot of icons.
- Hides the primary partitions which allows the user to have instaled more than one DOS and/or Windows in the same hard disk.
- Allows a password to be put on each operating system, denying access to non-authorized people.
- Allows the boot manager text to be translated to all languages.
- Can exchange disk drives, allowing to boot from the second, third... hard disk operating systems such as MS-DOS.
- Has the SafeBoot system, that allows to boot your hard disk even if GAG is accidentally overwrited.
- Supports a great variety of keyboards (QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ and DVORAK keyboards).
- Fully support for hard disks up to 4 terabytes (4096 gigabytes).
- Full version and free software (distributed under GPL licence, with source code)
Enhancements:
- 4.8 didnt remember the keyboard type after installing which, in certain situations, prevented you from reconfiguring it from the Setup menu.

grabslides project is a command line tool we created to automate the synchronisation of videos and slides during live and on-demande courses.
It can capture frames from either a Video4Linux device, or from an Axis Video Server, and offers unprecedented flexibility to configure this capturing : device, channel, interframe delay, resolution, compression factor, output directory, link to the current slide, and so on are all configurable items.
Some of them can be modified while the program is running through the use of signals, and in the future through a GUI. In addition, it can generate a PDF document which will contain all the captured slides. There again, multiple possibilities are offered.
We use this software every day to capture slides from the output of a VGA-to-Composite converter. Once the capture is done, a SMIL generator is run over the set of slides produced, and a SMIL file linking to the video and slides, both synchronised, is created. The SMIL generator we wrote will be published later.
Installation :
- Download and extract it :
$ tar -zxf grabslides-x.yy.tar.gz
where x.yy is grabslidess version number.
- Install grabslides :
e.g. :
$ cd grabslides-x.yy
$ python setup.py install
This will usually install grabslides into /usr/bin, although the exact location may vary depending on your system.
- Use grabslides :
$ grabslides --help
grabslides will display its lengthy help, and youll see the possibilities which are offered.
Enhancements:
- grabslides can now generate an HTML page containing all slides.
- XML presentations in the Aristote Associations OTESA format can also be generated.
- The 2-up mode now works in portrait mode when creating PDF.
- Finally grabslides can now synchronize itself on another process, and can exit automatically when the other process does.
- A nice example of PDF output is now available as well.

GRX is a library for 2D graphics, originaly written by Csaba Biegl for DJ Delories DOS port of the GCC compiler.

Now it support DOS (using the DJGPP v2 compiler), Linux console, X11 and Win32 (using the Mingw compiler).

On DOS it supports EGA, VGA and VESA compliant cards. On Linux console it uses svgalib or the framebuffer. On X11 only Linux is directly supported, but it must work on any X11R5 (or later) system after a few changes in a config file.

From the 2.4 version, GRX comes with a Win32 driver, from 2.4.6 you can considere it stable. The Linux console framebuffer video driver was new in 2.4.2, it is in alpha stage.

MGRX project is a 2D graphics library derived from the GRX library. GRX was originaly written by Csaba Biegl for DJ Delories DOS port of the GCC compiler. MGRX supports four platforms: DOS (DJGPPv2), Linux console, Linux X11 and Win32 (Mingw). On DOS it supports VGA and VESA compliant cards. On Linux console it uses the framebuffer. On X11 and Win32 it runs in a window.

Why MGRX

MGRX is a fork of GRX. Because I liked the GRX C API interface, I began to maintain GRX when it was orphaned at the end of 2000. But GRX has not only the C API, it has a Pascal API, a BGI compatibility API, support for Turbo C, Wattcom, MSC and some X11 implementations over mainframes. At the end it was not funny, to easy to break things I dont know (and dont want to know). So I stoped my job maintainig GRX at the end of 2003. At the time I write this, GRX is still orphaned.

But in the mean time I developed a fork for my own use, only the C API, no Pascal, no BGI, no Turbo C support, only the 4 platforms I can test. And a new (and better I think) input API. And now I have released it, only for fun.

Supported platforms:

Latest versions of OS, compiler, and key software tested:
Linux X11: linux 2.6.18, Xorg 7.2, gcc 4.1.2
Linux fb: linux 2.6.18, gcc 4.1.2
DJGPP: djdev 2.03, gcc 4.1.2
Win32: Windows XP, MinGW 3.1.0-1

Sigma Consolefonts package contains a set of UTF-8 fonts which provide readability and wide coverage. Actually, it is only one font, in an 8x16 size but with a number of variations of what gets mapped into the (psfu) consolefont. If you arent using Linux and a UTF-8 locale, this probably will not have any relevance to you.

Still interested ? Ok, here is a less than wonderful photograph of what the sigma-general version of this font can do. Apologies for the poor quality of the photo, I hope you can get an idea of what this does - and if you are using the linux console without a graphical desktop, youll just have to download it to try it out.

I aim to let people see as many characters as possible on their console. I know that most people assume a graphical desktop is necessary to see a wide range of characters, but the standard console can display 512 characters if you do without the bold colours.

Traditional console fonts have often used separate glyphs for cyrillic and latin letters of the same shape, but desktop fonts normally render them identically (e.g. latin A and cyrillic А), and so do I - this helps make some space available. I have used Dmitry Bolkhovityanovs perl script to select which glyphs are used in a particular psfu font, and to map multiple codepoints to the same glyph. There are a limited range of line-drawing characters (enough to give a decent display in the linux kernels make menuconfig).
The main use of these fonts is when you dont have a graphical desktop but still want to be able to read text in many languages. So, perhaps they are most appropriate to people running servers. For myself, they let me read my mail over ssh when I am building the graphical desktop for a new system.

The font itself started out as etl16 from one of the debian console packages. I altered it to give more balanced letters - longer descenders at the expense of less space above the letters, and bringing the accents closer to the letter. The cell format of a capital letter is 3 rows above the letter, 10 rows for the letter, and another 3 rows for the descender. In hex, that is 3A3, hence the name (U+03A3 is Σ).

Unlike traditional vga fonts hard-coded into the machine, these fonts are much less bright - you may have to increase your screens brightness. This is because they are thin (normally only one pixel wide). The 8x16 size is very much "one size fits all" - adequate for most accented latin, and for cyrillic and current greek, but not ideal where there are multiple accents (livonian, vietnamese, polytonic greek).
Unlike most other console fonts, these come with the source (a bdf font) and a series of map files to decide what to include. So, if you really dislike the form of one of the letters you can alter it - the bdf is just 16 lines of hex codes, e.g. a capital U has nine lines of x42 (0100 0010) and a baseline of x3C (0011 1100).

If you want to change a map, either to add something else, or to remove something you dont use, they are simple to edit.
The linux console cannot accomodate CJK languages, so this font is for people who use alphabetic languages. The armenian and georgian glyphs should be identical to what is in etl16, also the arabic and hebrew (and I really dont know how useful those are on a left-to-right terminal). Everything else has been tweaked to provide what I think is a satisfactory result.

The tarball includes my attempt at listing the alphabets for the languages covered - to answer the question, which glyphs do you need for a particular language. These files may also be useful if you are using xorg and want to check whether your fonts provide adequate coverage.

For most people, I think the general version should work well (latin, greek and the main european cyrillic letters). Some people may prefer the cyrillic variant (all current cyrillic, greek, some latin letters. There is also a caucasian variant (latin, cyrillic, armenian, georgian) and some other example and proof-of-concept variants, e.g. african, polytonic, vietnamese. Ultimately, the african languages are limited by a lack of precomposed glyphs in unicode (AFAIK, there is a lack of terminals which support combining diacriticals), but some languages such as venda should work. Languages with multiple accents above the letter (livonian, polytonic greek, vietnamese) are not wonderful in the 8x16 size, but they might suffice.

PPPstatus was developed for Linux users that are usually in console mode. It is a simple, easy to use program for displaying commonly needed / wanted statistics in real time about ingoing and outgoing TCP/IP traffic that is usually hard to find, with a simple, efficient interface.
With that in mind, I have decided to write something useful with exibition of a variety of protocol informations. Now the user has no need to edit PATH variables, given the fact that pppstatus covers almost all outputs from commands like pppstats, ifconfig, etc.
Main features:
- Theme (Change the Colors)
- Top Speed
- Shows local IP address
- Verify if theres a connection every 100 miliseconds
- Receiving/Transfering data LEDs
- Connection time
- 10x77 graphic, updated every second
- Constant change of modem speed, for better graphic interaction
- Interface selection (ppp0, ppp1 ...)
- Selection beetween two exibition modes: Monochromatic, VGA
- Check for new e-mails
- LOG file where all the datas of all conections are stored
- Costs Calculator

dxr3Player is a lightweight, command-line DVD player for Linux and the DXR3 (aka Hollywood+) MPEG-2 decoder boards. This software supports all major DVD features, including: menus, navigation, fast forward and backward playback, subtitles and camera angle changes.
The player is very conservative on memory usage and tries very hard (and mostly succeeds) to keep video and audio in sync.
dxr3Player also plays DVDs on any X Window System display using the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library.
The software relies on the following other pieces of software:
- The dxr3 (em8300) drivers developed for Linux by the dxr3 project at Sourceforge. It is needed to access the decoder board.
- The libmpdvdkit library from MPlayer (which is actually a modified copy of the libdvdread and libdvdcss libraries). It is incorporated into the sources, and is used to access the DVDs.
- The liba52 library also from MPlayer (which is actually a modified copy of liba52, an A-52 decoding library). It is incorporated into the sources, and is used to decode AC-3 audio streams.
- If you turn on LIRC support, the LIRC library.
- If you want to play MPEG audio, the MAD library.
- The Simple DirectMedia Layer library for displaying on an X Window display without hardware support.
- The libmpeg2 library for decoding MPEG video streams when not using the DXR3 board or the Unichrome chipset.
Main features:
- DVD menus
- navigation: jumping to previous and next chapter and menus
- fast forward and backward playback, pausing
- subtitles
- camera angle changes
- support for full-screen VGA "overlay"
- infrared remote control support via LIRC
- playback of AC3, Linear PCM and MPEG audio streams
- digital audio output (both PCM and AC-3)
- joystick as input device
- dump of complete DVDs to hard disks and playback from there
Version restrictions:
- of Linear PCM streams, only 48 kHz, 16-bit stereo ones are played
- as you can see, this homepage is quite rudimentary. However, I do not hope to change it soon anymore