Framebuffer selection menu
 

I am looking for a menu in vga=785 ( 640x480x256 ) what can display a specified background and 3 icons that can start applications. Anyone know where i could get it. or can place a small sample code where i can change a bit on it so i can get it working.

Thanks

What window manager are you using?

No window manager.

it is in the text mode.. level 3 i think its called :)

Correct me if I am missing something- it sounds(to me) like you are trying to use a framebuffer console as a window manager(menu, background image, icons...). It would be much easier to use X+a window manager/desktop. Is this a project you're working on? What distro are you using, btw?

Its not like a windows manager. it should only have 3 icons to start 3 applications. distro will be Voyage linux. so its debian. The menu should not do more than this as it will be placed in situation where the other options are not desired.

If you want to have a menu in text mode that's OK but the terms "background image" and icons are being misunderstood. Can you explain what you mean by these terms.

For full screen text menus you might find ncurses useful. Google will find plenty on ncurses, including the Linux Documentation Project's HOWTO.

Its not a text mode menu. I already delivered that. but they desire to have the background image with the company name in there. the 3 application should have 3 graphical icons with can be selected using a box around this icons and when the application is to be started this should go with enter. once the applications are started and ended it should go back into the same graphical menu.

Well, you can have a background without too much trouble using kernel patches available in gentoo, slackware and backtrack Linux source repository, but it will replace the VT background for the whole session, not only for the menu. Having icon can graphical layout on top of the frame buffer -is- possible, but nobody do it. Most people will use the X windows system at the very moment something graphical come into play. But you don't have to use Xorg. XfbDev is a X windows system running on top of the framebuffer, the whole binary and dependency tree is 1.1mb (3.* with xlib), start in less than 0.3 second and allow you to display graphical application. Any X applications will work (firefox, openoffice and so on), but they will run slower than normal. Qt applications run much faster because the only draw required pixel every time the windows is repainted, but it may not be the right toolkit for your application (too much dependencies). A pure xlib application would do. Then launch whatever you want.

Drawing directly on top of the frame buffer is not the fastest solution, it is a lot of work for nothing. If you find an easy solution, please share it, I would be interested in it too.

Hi ELV13

What i havent shared is that there was a working menu. but this system seems to be locked. so i cant get the old menu to work. and i want to recreate something like it. If you can help me get the menu going, which is a binary with some linked modules. then you also get youreself a solution. but i stopped looking into the excisting binary as i spend so many time in it to get it working that its maybe a simpler solution to make an menu myself.or if there is an opensource menu. wich i really doubt currently :) but time to build one with the right people.

What you can do if you really want to use framebuffer only solution is to take a look at usplash or splashy source code. They have everything to load an image (png) and you could just reload/redraw the whole thing when you grab an arrow keyboard even.

i did it doing drawing with fbv, and a shell script that read out the arrow keys
its not very sleek. but it does the job. every new selection the menu got redrawed :)