Other FAQs
Q My LCD panel is not showing text in white.
A From "Steve Sakoman" :- Your hardware is fine! The issue is a software one, but it is easily fixable.
Gumstix just began shipping the consoleLCD16 card included in your LCD-kit. Prior to this, the consoleLCD was the standard interface and it supported 18bpp. While 18bpp sounds better than 16bpp, the reality is that very few software packages support 18bpp very gracefully. Hence the change.
You are caught in the transition -- the kernel and rootfs on your motherboard were built for 18bpp support, but you are using a consoleLCD16. The wacky colors you see are the result. The software builds have been changed to rgb16 by default starting with revision 300.
The solution is simple -- update your kernel and rootfs. You can do this in one of two ways:
1. Set up a build environment and build your own image as described here
2. Use a pre-built image as described here.
Q: Is tinyx installed from factory?
A: No, you have to build it. Setup the build environment and bitbake gumstix-x11-image instead of the gumstix-basic-image to get tinyx + matchbox + cairo + gtk.
Q: Why are the icons and fonts displayed bad on tinyx/matchbox?
A: ConsoleLCD runs at 18bpp, depth that is supported by the X11 core package but not by renderers for fonts and icons, resulting in ugly screens. There is not currently a sw workaround to get the ConsoleLCD to work at a different bit depth, and the X11 stack may not ever work properly with 18bpp as the rendering path is made up of 4-6 different code bases, all with their own communities, developers & objectives. You could consider using qtopia for your GUI, as it supports 18bpp rendering.
Q: Why is the touchscreen from the samsung's lcd not working?
A: On older ConsoleLCD boards you have to solder a wire from the TSC2003 chip to a resistor
Q: How do you disable LCD standby after 10 minutes?
A: echo -ne "\033[9;0]\033[14;0]" > /dev/tty0 - (info: console_codes(4))
Q: What GUI Frameworks are supported by Gumstix?
A:
| Framework | Available in OE | 16bpp status | 18bpp status |
|---|---|---|---|
| DirectFB 1.1.0 | Yes | Working | Working (packages: directfb & directfb-examples or build gumstix-directfb-image) |
| Tiny-X (KDrive) | Yes | Working | Working with bad rendering, ugly screens, no workarounds yet |
| Nano-X 0.91 (microwindows) | Yes | Not working | Not working, doesn't like rgb18. The pxa270 lcd controller is not flexible enough to mux the lcd data outputs for the various pixel depths, so it is pretty much locked into rgb18 in hardware. work-in-progress |
| qtopia core 4.3.3 | Yes | added gumstix-qtopia-gui-image to autobuilder for testing (r221)- doesn't include apps so it doesn't do anything interesting yet | |
| qtopia core 4.4.0-tp1 | No | Working - touchscreen not working qtopia core howto | |
| qt-embedded 4.4.0-rc1 | No | Working - qtopia core howto | |
| qtopia platform 4.3.1 | No | testing - reported to compile qtopia platform howto | |
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