Ecere Blogging

The Ecere SDK finally supports all those things in the world of the penguins.Thanks go to Keith Packard for all his work on the Xrender extension which the SDK now makes use of.The runtime library now also supports fontconfig (new dependency for the standard libecere.so, also fontconfig requires libexpat.so.1 for parsing the XML config file), so it is no longer necessary to set the environment variable ECERE_FONTS.fontconfig will be used both with the X and the OpenGL driver.I tested with the default fonts.conf from latest X.org release 7.3, and the following free fonts:

• Aegean
• Bitstream CyberCJK
• Bitstream Cyberbit
• Bitstream Vera (Serif, Sans, Mono)
• Caliban, Caslon, Monospace
• Chandas
• Liberation (Serif, Sans, Mono)
• Sazanami Gothic & Mincho
• Sun-ExtB

Download

Yesterday I finally got around to building and installing the latest stable release of X.org (X11R7.3). They somehow decided that everything was to be split in many little packages. It discouraged me last time and made me choose to keep using XFree86. But since everyone seems to be moving to X.org, this time I went through the tedious task of downloading every packages. They don’t come with any makefiles or scripts with the proper make order either, and they have a lot of dependencies on other stuff as well (fontconfig, expat, …). I therefore had to figure out the proper build older and all this made me miss the simplicity of XFree86’s make world.

I had to call invoke X with “xinit — -ignoreABI” for my nVidia driver to work. Supposedly nVidia will come up with a new driver to fix that.

There was an issue with the ButtonPress/ButtonRelease mouse events which would cause multiple ButtonDown to be generated in Ecere applications. I addressed this issue, and went on to figure out why the Chess AI was taking so long to play his move. I learned that usleep in Linux will make the entire process sleep, not only the thread. I also reworked the X event loop to use select on the X display socket.

This should make Ecere Chess a lot more playable on Linux. I played a few games, I had a rook and a knight and he managed to fork my rook with his only knight for a stalemate Another game, he had a terrible start moving his king all around, all the way to my side of the board (I was going right for his king courageously with a lone pawn to pester him). I still ended up checkmate. My chess skills definitely need sharpening.

Download

This little Linux update resolves the panels issue. You would have had the problem if your desktop environment such as GNOME had a panel in the top or left edge of the screen.

The debugger is now working under Linux. You can now run the application through F5 / Debug, Start, place breakpoints, step through and watch eC expressions. Please keep in mind the debugger (like everything else in this early alpha SDK) is work in progress.

Download