[W]window system

W is a simple, socket based, two-color window system by Torsten Scherer (and has no relation to that X's predecessor with a same name). W 1 release 4 PL 1 main features are:

To compile and use W you'll need a small unix like setup (GNU C, make and linker + unix C-library) with networking (sockets), some method to access graphics memory linearly and at least 4MB of ram and free disk space.

Other information:


TheSche's official W1R3 sources are available through TeSche's WWW page.

Kay got a page for his W Toolkit. It will help a lot in making more complex applications.

Note that above links don't contain the latest sources, both Torsten and Kay are too busy to update W and Wt.


W is fairly portably but the screen is expected to be accessed as any other part of memory (eg. mmap()'ing the framebuffer device). Main planar bitplane graphics drivers use big-endian byte order, but there's a quick hack for monochrome that either swaps bytes or accesses screen byte at the time (it probably still does so long accesses with short alignments).

As W server interface and sources are under a lot of modifications, be prepared to re-compile it often and to even fix code if you don't have either MiNT or Linux. To this date everything has needed a recompilation or linking after new release.


Eero Tamminen, puujalka@modeemi.cs.tut.fi