GTK+ TTY Port 277
An anonymous reader writes: "FootNotes is reporting about what might be the coolest thing since textmode Quake: a curses-based GTK-2.0 port called Cursed GTK. This not only makes it possible to give Gnome the look and feel of Contiki, but also brings many real opportunities, such as remote logins where X forwarding is not possible, or remote logins over very slow modem lines. Screenshots here, here, here and here! Patches for bugs are welcomed by the authors."
I think you miss the point (Score:2, Informative)
A similar technology: 1986 WordPerfect on VAX/VMS (Score:5, Informative)
Mind you, this was in the days of DOS WordPerfect dominance, WPWin was relatively new.
But the coolest thing was graphics mode for non-graphics terminals. They abused the font download capabilities of the VT220-series terminals that were the standard for the day to create 'mosaics'. Decent pictures of bitmaps could be created. I could recognize B&W bitmaps pretty well. Lousy for pr0n, but good enough that a letter-writing system we set up had recognizable signatures.
Charva does the same for Java (Score:5, Informative)
see charva: http://www.pitman.co.za/projects/charva/ [pitman.co.za]
screenshot: http://www.pitman.co.za/projects/charva/images/ch
Re:Okay but (Score:4, Informative)
Judging from the screenshots, those just don't get rendered at all. Generally, the mapping algorithm to character cells seems to be quite smart though...
Because non CLI text interfaces are useful. (Score:5, Informative)
However, the utility of non-command oriented text interfaces is pretty well established. There is, of course, the venerable curses; pretty sophisticated non command text interfaces were the norm on MS-DOS in the pre-windows days. These often featured mouse input, which combined with text display is enough for a wide variety of applications. Don't know if this GTK supports mouse inputs. From the screenshots I'd guess not which somewhat limits its utility.
As an example of a non-command oriented text interface in common use today, look no farther than your BIOS setup program.
VNC merged with screen (Score:2, Informative)
With GTK++ TTY mode, you could have a virtual text-based desktop capable of controlling (via mouse) any thing you'd want without opening many virtual screens.
Re:Okay but (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Okay but (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yet another reason why linux isn't ready for Jo (Score:1, Informative)
Re:contiki for windows (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Eye Candy (Score:5, Informative)
http://tvision.sourceforge.net/
Re:But? (Score:5, Informative)
Remote logins over very slow modem lines: use NX (Score:2, Informative)
1019 B/s average, 1966 B/s 5s, 1050 B/s 30s, 2954 B/s maximum.
NX Compression Summary
link: MODEM with protocol compression enabled.
images: 22097472 bytes (21580 KB) packed to 2431560 (2375 KB).
Images compression ratio is 9.088:1.
overall: 25101152 bytes (24513 KB) in, 448863 bytes (438 KB) out.
Overall NX server compression ratio is 55.922:1.
NX is a free client+commercial server. Server is very cheap, compared to Citrix and uses X-Window as underlying protocol. Server compresses the X traffic down to the client to an extent that you never thought it was possible. The compression and X stuff are GPL while some parts are closed source. I don't care much, as the alternative would be MS+Citrix. There is a document explaining how compression is working (http://www.nomachine.com/doc_NX-XProtocolCompres
Re:And (Score:3, Informative)
It has the same miserable file selector dialog as the X11 version! Won't those monkeys ever realize what a barrier to adoption that thing is? It was behind the times they moment they wrote it.
Indeed. A new file selector is in the works [gtk.org]. In the meantime, discover the nice tab-completion feature. While I certainly agree there is room for improvement and definitely wouldn't suggest the file selector to my grandmother, I save/open files faster with the GTK dialog than any other I've used.
Re:Okay but (Score:5, Informative)
Re:XFree UI == UI free from XFree (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Remote logins over very slow modem lines: use N (Score:3, Informative)
Just to clarify, do everything on the command line using the GPLed stuff, running a remote GUI session over a modem. It's only the GUI interface to this functionality which is non-free.