Links

Tutorials

• Vintage Fresco Tutorial
  This is the Tutorial that came along with the Fresco Toolkit for X-Windows. Although some names have changed it still is a great document to find out about the ideas behind our Project.

• Fresco Tutorial
  Continuous documentation and tutorial for understanding modern Fresco.

• French Fresco Tutorial
  Continuous documentation and tutorial for understanding modern Fresco, in French. (beta)

Mailing lists

• fresco-announce
  Low-volume Fresco-related announcements list

• fresco-devel
  General Fresco development discussion

• fresco-changes
  Changelogs for commits to the Fresco tree

Important documents

• AlternativeLinux 1999 (GZIP PS)
  AlternativeLinux 1999 (Montreal, Canada)

• LinuxTag 2000 (HTML)
  LinuxTag 2000 (Stuttgart, Germany)

• LinuxTag 2000 (HTML)
  LinuxTag 2000 (Stuttgart, Germany)

• FOSDEM 2003 (PDF incl. notes)
  FOSDEM 2003 (Brussels, Belgium)

• Linux Magazin 12/2000, Germany, "Nieder mit der X-Mauer!"
  Introductionary article by Tobias Hunger (in German)

• Linux Magazine 01/2001, UK, "Down with the X-Wall!"
  Translation of the article into english.

• Ottawa Linux Symposium 2000 (GZIP PS)
  Ottawa Linux Symposium 2000 (Ottawa, Canada)

Important Wiki pages

• Wiki Frontpage
  Hopefully this will become a useful site for storing some FAQ's, TaskList, HelpDealingWithFresco, DesignDiscussion, ProgrammingGuides, etc.

• Fresco vs. X
  X is the dominant Windowing System for the Unix platform. This site tries to outline the principal differences from an architectural point of view between X and Fresco.

• Widgets
  Widgets are the most prominent building blocks in graphical user interfaces. Traditionally, they are described as classes/structures with lots of attributes attached to them. Every widget has a parent, composite widgets have children.

• FAQ
  Frequently Asked Questions.

Important external links

• GGI
  The General Graphics Interface Project.

• CORBA
  The Common Object Request Broker Architecture.

• GLUT
  Graphics Library Ultra Trendy

• X.org
  The guys holding up the X-flag.

• squeak
  Squeak is a multimedia authoring system running in a virtual machine. It is based on the idea of morphs (which we would call a Graphic) that can get displayed and modified to create complex simulations, graphics and even sounds. Go and play with it to get an impression about what can be done with a OO based GUI environment.

• Humane Environment
  This project tries to realise the ideas layed out in Jef Raskin's book "The Humane Interface". There is not much code yet, and what is there is for the Mac only. I liked the book, so it might be worth keeping an eye on what these people are doing.

• SourceForge pages
  The SourceForge site.

• Berlin's SourceForge pages
  Berlin has all our developments at the SourceForge site.

Other GUI projects

• GNUstep
  A free NeXT/Openstep clone. GNUstep is in active development.

• OpenBeOS
  A free clone of the BeOS Operating System including it's GUI environment. OpenBeOS is in active development.

• NeWS
  NeWS used to be a powerful windowing system originally developed by SUN, long since discontinued. This site has what's left of it.

• InterViews
  Learn a bit about InterViews, the predecessor of Fresco.

• PicoGUI
  PicoGUI is somewhat similar in scope and technology to what we do. There are some small details setting both projects apart: We tend to be a bit more generic, they have way cooler screenshots;-) PicoGUI is in active development.

• Plan 9
  Developed by Bell Labs, Plan 9 is a distributed Operating System. It is not really in scope here, but then it had some rather unusual GUI handlers, written to behave like file servers to the host system.

• 8.5, the Plan9 GUI server
  8.5 was the first try to get a GUI environment integrated into Plan9. It is a very interesting concept, although not really applicable to Fresco.

• Rio, the new Plan9 GUI server
  Rio enhances 8.5's ideas a bit and became its successor. This PDF file is all I could dig up.

• Pieper
  The Pied Piper Desktop project aims to make a desktop that utilises a peer-to-peer distributed data flow system and the resulting network. Piper is in active development.

• Montage
  A experimental windowing system written in scheme using processes instead of objects. Only this paper is left from this project.

• CRUST
  Crust is a display system for Nova. In the meantime, until Nova is ready, development is done under GNU/Hurd. It is designed with speed, look and usefulness in mind. I listed this project here as a place holder for other pixel-based, non network-transparent projects using client-side libraries for their look and feel. I know of a couple more that are out there! CRUST is in active development.

• OpenGUI
  If you came here looking for Berlin's first incarnation as a thin, Assembler-driven GUI system, then this is the project for you to look at: OpenGUI is a high-Level C/C++ graphics and windowing library built upon a fast, low-level x86 asm graphics kernel. It is under LGPL license. OpenGUI provides 2D drawing primitives and an event-driven windowing API for easy application development. You can write apps in the old Borland BGI style or in a windowed style like QT. OpenGUI supports the keyboard and mouse as event sources, and the Linux framebuffer/svgalib/X11 as drawing backends. Mesa3D is also supported under Linux.

• WASABI
  A haptic window system: Adding real feel to the user experience. I'd love to get more information on this one, unfortunately all available docs are in Japanese.

• 3Dsia
  The 3Dsia project aims to create a complete intuitive to use 3D-Environment. Inspired by William Gibson's novels, their philosophy differs completely from prevailing 3D-GUIs, that just try to rebuild a windowing System in a 3D space. 3Dsia is in active development.

• 3Dwm
  The Three Dimensional Workspace Manager is focusing on the development of a general-purpose platform for 3D user interface.

• DOpE
  A new project, trying for a windowing environment on top of the L4 microkernel. The issue separating this from other projects is that this one will incorporate realtime aspects into the GUI environment. Not much documentation yet, what is there is in german (check under Files).

• OpenCroquet
  A Squeak-based 3D GUI system from the guy that brought us Smalltalk (and others of course;-). They have a very nice PDF tutorial.