Quick Start

Introduction

MiniGUI, developed by FMSoft Technologies, originates from a famous free and open source software project, which is initiated by Wei Yongming. MiniGUI aims to provide a fast, stable and lightweighted graphics user interface (GUI) support system for real-time embedded systems and smart IoT devices. After over 20 years of development since the end of 1998, MiniGUI has become a stable and reliable one for widespread application in a variety of products and programs; it can run on Linux/uClinux, ThreadX, RT-Thread, RTEMS, FreeRTOS, eCos, VxWorks, pSOS, ThreadX, Nucleus, OSE, and even uC/OS-II.

MiniGUI defines a set of lightweight windowing and graphics interfaces for applications. Using these interfaces, an application can create multiple windows and show controls (such as buttons and edit boxes) in windows. MiniGUI provides powerful graphics functions for developers, helping to display all kinds of images and draw complicated graphics in windows.

MiniGUI consists of MiniGUI core and multiple MiniGUI components, as well as samples, demonstrations, and applications. MiniGUI core and components are written in C languages, so it is easy to run MiniGUI on various systems or platforms.

MiniGUI core provides the basic windowing and graphics interfaces as well as a lot of standard controls (toolkit). Besides MiniGUI core, FMSoft also releases some components for easy development of MiniGUI apps:

  • mGUtils contains miscellaneous utilities like ColorSelectionDialogBox, FileOpenDialogBox, and so on.

  • mGPlus provides support for 2D vector graphics functions like path, gradient, anti-aliased stretch, and color combination.

  • mGEff provides an animation framework for MiniGUI apps. It also provides some popular UI special effects.

  • mGNCS provides a new control set for MiniGUI apps.

  • mGNCS4Touch provides some new controls, which are compliant to the control specification of mGNCS, for devices with touch screens.

There are also some legacy MiniGUI components. But we no longer maintain these components since MiniGUI v3.2.0:

  • mGi: An input method component for MiniGUI. This component provides some typical input methods (such as soft keyboard, hand-writing, and predict text input for mobile phone) for MiniGUI apps.

  • mGp: A printing component for MiniGUI. By using mGp, you can print out the graphics created by MiniGUI app to general-purpose printers.

  • mG3d: A simple three-dimension component for MiniGUI. This component provides a simple 3D API for app. You can use mG3d to create simple 3D UI.

MiniGUI Releases

Note that you can download three releases of MiniGUI:

  • MiniGUI version 3.0.x. This release is no longer maintained. This release is there only for old projects.

  • MiniGUI version 3.2.x. Main features since version 3.0:

    • Support for 64-bit platform.

  • MiniGUI version 4.0.x. Main features since version 3.2:

    • New APIs for Unicode characters processing, which conform to Unicode 12.0.

    • New APIs to lay out, shape, and render glyphs from complex and mixed scripts, such as Arabic, Thai, and Indic.

    • Support for all types of input devices such as multi-touch panel (gesture), joystick, tablet tool, and switch.

    • Support for modern DRM-driven graphics cards on Linux kernel for 2D/3D hardware acceleration.

The compatibility of some APIs (mainly MiniGUI Core) will be broken between different releases. For detailed explanation, you can refer to the release notes of MiniGUI core and components:

We strongly recommend that you use MiniGUI version 4.0.x for any new MiniGUI apps, especially if the new features of MiniGUI 4.0.x are must for your new apps.

Source Tarballs and Repos

All software packages of MiniGUI are listed as following:

  • MiniGUI Core and components:

    • libminigui: MiniGUI Core.

    • libmgutils: mGUtils component.

    • libmgplus: mGPlus component.

    • libmgeff: mGEff component.

    • libmgncs: mGNCS component.

    • libmgncs4touch: mGNCS4Touch component.

    • minigui-res: the resource tarball including fonts, cursors, icons, and bitmaps used by MiniGUI.

    • mg-tests: The unit tests for MiniGUI Core (since 4.0.0).

  • Samples and demos:

    • mg-samples: Samples for MiniGUI Core and components.

    • mguxdemo: mGUXDemo is the comprehensive demonstration for MiniGUI Core and components.

    • mg-demos: A set of demos as supplements of mGUXDemo.

  • Tools and third party libraries

    • gvfb: the virtual frame buffer Gtk version.

    • mg-tools: The tools for font conversion and in-core resource generation.

    • libjpeg v7: MiniGUI uses this library to decode JPEG image files.

    • libpng v1.2.x: MiniGUI uses this library to decode PNG image files.

    • libpng v1.6.x: MiniGUI uses this library to decode PNG image files (MiniGUI Core 4.0.0 or later).

    • zlib V1.2.x: libpng uses the compression algorithm providing by this library.

    • freetype v2.6.x: MiniGUI uses this library to render TrueType/OpenType/Type1 fonts.

    • harfbuzz v2.5.x: MiniGUI Core 4.0.0 or later uses this library to shape complex scripts.

    • chipmunk v5.3.1: mGNCS4Touch uses this library for animation timing.

The source code tarballs of MiniGUI and its components can be downloaded from the download zone of MiniGUI Official Website:

http://www.minigui.com/download

FMSoft has created public repositories for MiniGUI Core and components on GitHub. You can visit them at:

https://github.com/VincentWei

FMSoft also released some open source apps for MiniGUI at the site above, for example:

  • mDolphin, licensed under Apache 2.0, is a full-featured WEB/WAP browser, which is developed based on the open source browser core WebKit and uses MiniGUI as its underlying graphics support system.

  • mGallery, licensed under Apache 2.0, intends to provide a total solution for PMP (Portable Multimedia Player), which uses MiniGUI as the graphics platform.

  • mSpider, licensed under GPL 3.0, intends to provide a light-weight MiniGUI-based web browser (HTML 3.2 and part JavaScript)

  • mEagle, licensed under GPL 3.0, is an embedded GIS development platform which addresses the needs of map browse, query, analysis, etc

You can find the public repositories of above apps on:

https://github.com/FMSoftCN

Besides MiniGUI, FMSoft also released tools and dependencies of MiniGUI, such as the virtual buffer program GVFB, freetype, libjpeg, libpng, zlib, and others. Please refer to:

http://www.minigui.com/download

Documents

FMSoft now maintains the documents of MiniGUI on GitHub:

https://github.com/VincentWei/minigui-docs

All documents are classified into the following parts:

We also maintain some supplementary documents on MiniGUI Wiki:

https://github.com/VincentWei/minigui/wiki

First Run

Recommended development environment

Now, Linux has become a software development host system that is more important than MS Windows. Almost all building toolchains can run on Linux, and you can use Linux to write and debug code for Cloud, Web, embedded devices, and many real time operating systems such as eCos, RTEMS, RT-Thread.

Therefore, since MiniGUI version 3.2, we only maintain the building scripts of MiniGUI for Linux. Of course, it is still possible to build MiniGUI on MS Windows.

We recommend that your use Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS or 18.04 LTS. The building scripts of MiniGUI are tested on these two Linux distributions.

Since MiniGUI 3.2, we maintain some simple scripts to fast fetch the code and build all dependencies for the comprehensive demonstration (mGUXDemo) of MiniGUI Core and components. So it is very easy to build MiniGUI on a Ubuntu Linux distribution.

The following figures are some screenshots of mGUXDemo.

mGUXDemo Screenshot 1
mGUXDemo Screenshot 3
mGUXDemo Screenshot 4
mGUXDemo Screenshot 5
mGUXDemo Screenshot 6
mGUXDemo Screenshot 9

Building MiniGUI 4.0

Prerequisites

First, make sure that you are using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 18.04 LTS.

You should run sudo apt install <package_name> to install the following packages on your Ubuntu system.

  • Building tools:

    • git

    • gcc/g++

    • binutils

    • autoconf/automake

    • libtool

    • make

    • cmake

    • pkg-config

  • Dependent libraries:

    • libgtk2.0-dev

    • libjpeg-dev

    • libpng12-dev (libpng-dev on Ubuntu 18.04 instead)

    • libfreetype6-dev

    • libinput-dev

    • libdrm-dev

    • libsqlite3-dev

    • libxml2-dev

    • libssl1.0-dev

    • electric-fence (used by mg-tests)

Note that if you are using Ubuntu 18.04, please install libpng-dev. Ubuntu 18.04 does not provide support for libpng12-dev.

Steps

Please make sure that you can visit GitHub and you can do sudo on your Ubuntu system.

  1. Clone build-minigui-4.0 repository from GitHub:

     $ git clone git@github.com:VincentWei/build-minigui-4.0.git
 $ cd build-minigui-4.0

  2. Copy config.sh to myconfig.sh and edit myconfig.sh to match your needs:

     $ cp config.sh myconfig.sh

  3. Run fetch-all.sh to fetch all source code from GitHub:

     $ ./fetch-all.sh

  4. Run build-deps.sh to build and install gvfb, chipmunk, and harfbuzz:

     $ ./build-deps.sh

  5. Run build-all.sh to build all:

     $ ./build-all.sh

  6. Run mguxdemo:

     $ cd /usr/local/bin
 $ ./mguxdemo

When there is any update in the remote repos, you can run update-all.sh to update. You can run clean-build-all.sh to uninstall, clean, and re-install them.

Note that you might need to run ldconfig to refresh the shared libraries cache before running mguxdemo.

Commands to build dependencies

The following steps are the ones in build-deps.sh. We list them here for your information:

  1. Make and install gvfb:

     $ cd gvfb
 $ cmake .
 $ make; sudo make install
 $ cd ..

  2. Make and install chipmunk library (DO NOT use the chipmunk-dev package which is provided by Ubuntu):

     $ cd 3rd-party/chipmunk
 $ cmake .
 $ make; sudo make install
 $ cd ../..

  3. Make and install harfbuzz library (DO NOT use the harfbuzz-dev package which is provided by Ubuntu):

     $ cd 3rd-party/harfbuzz
 $ ./autogen.sh
 $ ./config-extern.sh
 $ make; sudo make install
 $ cd ../..

Building MiniGUI 3.2

Prerequisites

First, make sure that you are using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

You can run apt install <package_name> to install the software on Ubuntu.

  • Building tools:

    • git

    • gcc/g++

    • binutils

    • autoconf/automake

    • libtool

    • make

    • cmake

    • pkg-config

  • Dependent libraries:

    • libgtk2.0-dev

    • libjpeg-dev

    • libpng12-dev

    • libfreetype6-dev

    • libsqlite3-dev

    • libxml2-dev

    • libssl-dev

Steps

Please make sure that you can visit GitHub via SSH and you can do sudo on your Ubuntu systme.

  1. Clone build-minigui-3.2 repository from GitHub:

     $ git clone git@github.com:VincentWei/build-minigui-3.2.git
 $ cd build-minigui-3.2

  2. Run fetch-all.sh to fetch all source code from GitHub:

     $ ./fetch-all.sh

  3. Make and install gvfb:

     $ cd gvfb
 $ cmake .
 $ make; sudo make install
 $ cd ..

  4. Make and install chipmunk library (DO NOT use the chipmunk-dev package which is provided by Ubuntu):

     $ cd 3rd-party/chipmunk-5.3.1
 $ cmake .
 $ make; sudo make install
 $ cd ../..

  5. Install MiniGUI resources:

     $ cd minigui-res
 $ ./augen.sh
 $ ./configure
 $ sudo make install
 $ cd ..

  6. Run build-all.sh to build all:

     $ ./build-all.sh

  7. Run mguxdemo:

     $ cd /usr/local/bin
 $ ./mguxdemo

When there is any update in the remote repos, you can run update-all.sh to update. You can run clean-build-all.sh to uninstall, clean, and re-install them.

Note that you might need to run ldconfig to refresh the shared libraries cache before running mguxdemo.

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