“A Linux GUI consists of several individual parts, some of which
may be interchangeable. The GUI provided by desktop Linux
distributors like Red Hat, SuSE, or Debian includes a windowing
system for basic drawing and overlapping window support, a widget
set (or sets) for applications to use, a window manager to
implement windowing policies and to decorate windows, and a desktop
environment to tie everything together into a coherent whole. For
an embedded GUI, the windowing system and widget set are the most
important components.“There are several embeddable widget sets for Linux, including
Qt/E, FLTK, and GTK+. These can run on several possible windowing
systems, including the X Window System and a direct framebuffer
interface. An embedded systems developer must ask: Which
combination of options is right for my system? Which widget toolkit
should I adopt? How much engineering effort is needed to tweak to
spec? What footprint will all this require?“This article describes our experience designing and
implementing a custom GUI for a consumer Linux device. We decided
to use GTK+ running on the X Window System. It took five
engineer-months to produce our stable, customized and
reduced-footprint GUI totaling 2.9MB (including X)…”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
LinuxToday is a trusted, contributor-driven news resource supporting all types of Linux users. Our thriving international community engages with us through social media and frequent content contributions aimed at solving problems ranging from personal computing to enterprise-level IT operations. LinuxToday serves as a home for a community that struggles to find comparable information elsewhere on the web.
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