Feynman Software has released a new version of MiniGUI which adds support for uClinux. The release can be built for uClinux with or without thread support. MiniGUI's original author Wei Yongming claims that the threaded version ranks among the best GUI systems available for uClinux.

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According to Mr. Wei, MiniGUI is a GPLed free software project, led by Feynman Software which is located in Beijing, China. It aims to be a fast, stable, lightweight Graphical User Interface (GUI) support system for embedded use, especially for real-time embedded systems based on Linux. MiniGUI has been developed since 1999 mainly for embedded Linux.

MiniGUI defines a set of light windowing and GDI APIs for applications. An application using MiniGUI can easily create multiple windows and controls on the screen, and can draw in these windows/controls smoothly, according to Wei.

MiniGUI can be configured and compiled with thread support as MiniGUI-Threads or without as MiniGUI-Lite.

MiniGUI-Threads is based on the POSIX-threads library. A program running on MiniGUI-Threads can create cascaded windows in different threads, with all the windows belonging to a single process. MiniGUI-Threads is suitable for more complex embedded systems, such as PDAs, SmartPhones, and STBs, claims Wei, who adds that MiniGUI-Threads is among the best GUI systems for running applications on uClinux.

MiniGUI-Lite uses simplified client/server architecture. A program running on MiniGUI-Lite is an independent process, which can also create multiple windows and communicate with server processes via Unix domain sockets. Wei says MiniGUI-Lite is fit for some real-time systems with simple functionality.

MiniGUI v1.3.0 is a small milestone and also a beginning of the next development phase, according to Wei. You can download the library, fonts, demos, and screenshots from here.

 
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