Using Gosu without starting X server

By misbehavens Date 2013-05-17 05:28

I am planning on building a Gosu application which launches on startup of my Raspberry Pi. I installed Ruby 1.9.3 and the Gosu gem. When I ran a simple Gosu example game, I got the error "Cannot find display (RuntimeError)". That's when I realized that I could not run Gosu without starting the X window server.

I'm not that familiar with the lower level internals of Linux and Gosu, so I'm wondering, is there any way that I can run a Gosu application without starting X server? I would rather not waste the time and resources to start up all the GUI stuff just to ignore it by running a full screen Gosu application.

Thoughts?

--Andrew

By jlnr (dev) Date 2013-05-17 09:32

There was an attempt at porting Gosu in the very, very early days of the Pi:

http://www.libgosu.org/cgi-bin/mwf/topic_show.pl?pid=5638

From what I remember this continued on IRC and the biggest obstacle was in fact Gosu's dependency on X11 (or alternatively Win32/Apple APIs).

There was a snippet of code on github that demonstrated how to open an OpenGL ES context using a proprietary, binary driver, but the snippet itself had no license attached so I kept my hands off it.

Do you know how other libraries handle it? If there is a way to open an OpenGL ES context, then most of Gosu should immediately work. Font rendering, audio, input are the next step then.

I am also not sure if I can help much without owning one myself :) I only have a little zoo of mobile devices for general OpenGL ES development.

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