About the server Terminal in genode

[Norman Feske]

Hi Jimmy,

please excuse the late response to your question.

I think that your goal is a bit to ambitious just for getting started.
There are two reasons why I'm thinking that: First, right now, the
terminal has a built-in pixel font and an extremely simple glyph
rendering routine. Supporting chinese letters would mean to replace the
glyph rendering with a much more sophisticated routine, possibly based
on Freetype. To make it perform well, you will also need to add a cache
of rasterized glyphs. We omitted all this from the terminal to keep it
as simple as possible. The second stumbling block would be the missing
support for UTF8. Right now, the terminal supports just ASCII.

I am afraid that extending the terminal would not serve you well with
getting acquainted with Genode. Also, the result would possibly spoil
the simplicity of the current terminal.

Instead of enhancing Genode's terminal implementation, what about
porting an existing fully-fledged terminal emulator, for example one
based on Qt5? I think this would be much more interesting, and would
spare you the details of font and glyph management. Also, this
experience would teach you how to integrate existing software as a
service (in this case a terminal service) into the Genode system. I
would regard this as a more valuable lesson to learn than dealing with
the inner atrocities of terminal emulators.

Finally, I'm pretty sure that a ported fully complete terminal emulator
(with support for scroll-back buffer, 256 colors, support for different
languages) would be a lauded addition to Genode. ;-)

Cheers
Norman


On 01/15/2014 01:16 PM, jimmy jin wrote:
> Hey
> 
> I am reading the code of  the server terminal.
> 
> how should i modify the code  if i want to make it support chinese letters.
> 
> I am a beginning learner and  hope you could make it clear to me.  
> 
> 
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Jimmy 


-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org

Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden
Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth