4. Getting started with picoTK

The following describes installation and configuration of picoTK. It has been tested with SuSE 7.0 and a RedHat 6.1 Linux distributions.

4.1 Requirements

• Xlib development support
• XServer with 8, 16 or 24 bits color depth. 8bpp is discouraged though.

4.2 Installation

• Choose a subdirectory for the installation of RTEMS and picoTK. picotk and rtems shall share the same parent directory, for the Makefiles to work properly.
• Unpack the distribution tarball

     tar xzf picotk-xx.tgz
  

• Make picoTK

     cd picotk
     make
  

Note: picoTK cannot be compiled from a text console, since the fontripper tool requires access to a running X-Server.

4.3 Running the picoTK demo

From a common directory exacute the following. It is important to run these programs from the same directory as they need access to the same shared memory file handle fbe_buffer.

   emulators/fbe &         ; This starts fbe in 4bpp mode (The demo 
                             is compiled for this)
   demo/demo               ; Start demo

4.4 Customizing picoTK

picoTK can be tailored by changing the picotk/toolkit/Makefile. This Makefile is responsible for generating the libPTK.a static library, which is to be compiled into the application.

Color depth and resolution settings

The following variables in toolkit/Makefile determine the driver settings:

     COLOR_DEPTH
     PIXLS_X
     PIXLS_Y
     PIXLS_TOTAL_X
     BASE_ADDR

COLOR_DEPTH specifies the color depth - and in consequence the driver to be used. It's either 1, 4 or 8.

PIXLS_X and PIXLS_Y specify the X and Y display sizes in pixels.

PIXLS_TOTAL_X specifies the number of total X pixels. This is normally equal to PIXLS_X but eventually greater. For example custom hardwware may decide - easing implementation - to have a total X size of 512 Pixel, while only 320 are displayed. The number of total pixels is required to get the correct offset address into the framebuffer.

BASE_ADDR is the physical address where the linear frame buffer starts. The special macro LILO_VGA_BASE can be used instead of the actual address to request the frame buffer start from pc386_lilo; this is required for VESA VGA flat linear frame buffer modes.

Fonts

You can change the fonts included in the library by changing the Makefile. The picoTK tool fontripper rips a X-Font from the X-server and converts them into a C sourcefile. The file contains a (large) initialized unsigned char[] array wich contains the ripped font in a distinct format (see PTK.h, struct picoFont for the actual format). The makefile makes use of the fontripper for every font to be converted. fontripper accepts two arguments. Firstly the X-font name, in the way X understands fonts, i.e. the XFLD (X font logical description) containing wildcards (asterisk) for properties, which need not to be matched. Secondly fontripper gets a "picoTK name", this is used for referencing the font from within your picotk application. The common conventions for filenames and variable names are as follows:

       <picoTK name>.c     The font source text
       <picoTK name>.o     The conpiled picotk font
       <font_picoTK name>  The reference (=variable name) for use in the 
                              application

4.5 Customizing the framebuffer emulator

Start fbe with option -help to get a list of available options