Microwindows

In computing, Microwindows is a windowing system which is full featured enough to be used on a PC or a PDA. The Nano-X Window System is an Open Source project aimed at bringing the features of modern graphical windowing environments to smaller devices and platforms. The project was renamed to Nano-X Window System, due to legal threats from Microsoft regarding the Windows trademark.

Nano-X's origin is with NanoGUI. NanoGUI was created by Alex Holden by taking David Bell's mini-X server and Alan Cox's modifications and adding client/server networking. Gregory Haerr then took interest in the NanoGUI project and began making extensive enhancements and modifications to NanoGUI. Around version 0.5, Gregory Haerr added support for multiple API's, and began distributing Microwindows. In Microwindows 0.84, all previous NanoGUI changes were incorporated and since then has been the combined NanoGUI/Microwindows distribution. In January 2005, the system changed its name to the Nano-X Window System, with a planned first release as v0.91.

The Nano-X Window System is extremely portable, and completely written in C, although some routines have been recoded in assembly for speed. It has been ported to the Intel 16 and 32 bit CPUs, as well as MIPS R4000 (NEC Vr41xx) StrongARM and PowerPC chips found on popular handheld and pocket PCs. There have been rumors of an SH3 port as well.

The Nano-X Window System currently runs on 32-bit Linux systems with kernel framebuffer support, or through the popular SVGAlib library. In addition, it has been ported to 16-bit Linux ELKS, and real mode MS-DOS. Microwindows screen drivers for 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 bits-per-pixel have been written, as well as a VGA 16 color 4 planes driver.

Recently, an X11 driver was completed that allows Microwindows applications to be run on top of the X Window desktop. This driver emulates all of Microwindows' truecolor and palette modes so that an application can be previewed using the target system's display characteristics directly on the desktop display, regardless of the desktop display characteristics.

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