Under Construction

The SVGAlib unit for Free Pascal

Overview

Under Linux, you can use libvga to access the graphical screen from the console. Free Pascal has a unit which makes linking to the libvga possible. You can find the unit, as well as a makefile and some test programs here. You just need to compile it, put a reference to it in your program or unit, and that is it. There are 2 units in this package:

Requirements:

To use this unit, you need at least:

Installation:

The svga lib unit comes with the packages of free pascal. You can, however, download the units here. This contains a subdirectory svgalib. Change to this directory.

Edit the makefile to suit your setup (compiler, options, where do you want to install) type 

make
and all units will be compiled. Then type 
make install
To install the units.

Testing:

Two small testprograms have been provided: typing 
make test
will compile the programs.

Caveats

It is possible that you must be root to run these programs, The SVGAlib docs I have aren't clear about that. If the programs should be able run as another user, you should make them setuid root. I tested everything as root, and it ran smoothly, your mileage may vary, however.

Future Plans

It would be nice to have a borland style GRAPH unit wrapped around this; just for beginners or people who wish to port some old DOS code. Someone already started tha, but I couldn't get it to run on my machine. If you have any ideas, feel free to contact me at michael.vancanneyt@freepascal.org.
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