ex11 on the Blackdog

There is a neat little X11 library for Erlang called ex11 written by Joe Armstrong. It's not just a wrapper around the Xlib C library - it talks the directly to the X server using the underlying X protocol. It is very fast and efficient.

With a few tweaks I got the latest working copy of the code (from here) working on the Blackdog. The archive for installing on the Blackdog device is ex11.tar.bz2 and is around 1MB in size. Just untar this file from the root home directory:

  cd /root
  tar jxvf ex11.tar.bz2

You will need to have set up Erlang on the Blackdog first. A 'demo.sh' shell script runs a number of examples:

  cd /root/ex11-latest-snapshot-2004-09-09
  sh demo.sh

The 'tweak' I had to make to the ex11 source was to stop it from looking for the .Xauthenticate file and instead connect to host:0.0, which is what the Blackdog uses to identify the host X server. For some reason the BD doesn't have .Xauthenticate or even the Xauth command. ex11 runs very snappy on the Blackdog.

Categories: erlang, blackdog