OSDev.org

Hello, I was wondering if anyone had any information or knew of good sites that offer info on writing your own gui for an existing kernel.  I would like to take the linux kernel and write my own gui for it with OpenGL.  Or maybe use an existing linux distribution and just write the gui and not use kde or gnome.  If you could help I would appreciate it.  Thanks.
Tim Wylie

Well, first off, I wish you the best of luck, and hope you've done some kernel hackin' before, 'cuz it ain't easy

With that out of the way, however, I'm not quite sure what you're trying to accomplish.  Gnome and KDE aren't windowing systems, but rather user interfaces build on top of X11.

Are you looking to rewrite a windowing system (aka X11, or Berlin) or are you looking to create a new user interface (aka KDE, Gnome).  Either one's a daunting task, and will take one person years to complete...

My web site (www.neuraldk.org) has tutorials on X11 programming, if that's what windowing system you'd like to use, or, if you're looking to rewrite the entire thing, you can take a look at my 'Smoke' application, which is a windowing system I developed to run under 'Petal' (a graphics library I wrote that runs on X11 and DOS).  Both applications are old, but the techniques haven't changed.

Lastly, however, both the KDE and Gnome allow you to write your own custom interface as is... they're both very customizeable.  You might be better off writting new interfaces for either and therefore maintain the entire application bases of each project (seeing as though they have thousands of apps already written for them...!)

And, there's also already an alternative windowing system project existing for Linux called Berlin.  It's aim is to replace X11 on Linux... I have no idea if the project still exists... I haven't heard much about it in a while, but you might consider taking a look at it, as well.

Cheers,
Jeff

The Berlin project is now known as Fresco, and can be found at http://www2.fresco.org/index.html

Cheers,
Jeff

Thanks for the quick reply.  Well, let me be honest about my intentions.  I'm not sure exactly how everything will work.  It may be better to just write a full screen application that runs in kde or gnome.  I want to make a 3d graphical environment to run many systems in the OS.  My original plan was for that to be the GUI interface and if there was something that was a 2d based application you could log in to the typical kde environment.  So, in the 3d environment it would be synonymous as sitting down at a computer in the room, and that would load the entire screen with the kde desktop, and then you would log out when done and go back to the 3d OS.  So, I still want to use the X11 system but I want to use it as well as a 3d environment.  That way if someone was lost they could log in to the typical interface and be OK.  

Well, I'm not exactly sure what the best way to go about all this is.  The programming wouldn't be a problem, although I do need to learn a lot about kernel programming.(or I could use another distribution and just put the gui on  top of it).  Anyway, If you have any more help I would appreciate it.