SDL status (was Re: Rewriting for Linux?)

[Albert Cahalan]

Rob Savoye writes:
> Mamading Ceesay wrote:
>> On 02/04/07, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:

>> That doesn't jibe with my understanding of the current state
>> of SDL on OLPC.  My understanding is that SDL isn't working
>> and there isn't any
>
> The last time I tried using SDL on an X0, it appeared to have
> a problem correctly writing to the framebuffer. Supposedly this
> was a known problem at that time, but I haven't checked recently.
> I've been using GTK instead as Gnash supports multiple GUI toolkits.

SDL works perfectly. Here is Tux Paint on the B2 XO:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Tux_Paint

SDL apps do need to handle 5:6:5 color correctly. Gnash is doing
something wrong with SDL. Maybe it uses a hardware surface and/or
tries to send 24-bit data. This kind of thing just doesn't get
tested much anymore, because 8:8:8 is the standard.

There is an RPM problem, closed because I can't test or even respond
as fast as Jim Gettys can close bugs, which involves SDL_Mixer
pulling all sorts of junk including Qt. Fedora is really bad about
having non-critical stuff as dependencies. Fixing this one doesn't
even require dlopen().

There are also performance problems caused by the 5:6:5 color,
but this isn't specific to SDL. CPUs have built-in support for
accessing 8-bit values, but not for 5-bit and 6-bit values.