I spent the weekend trying to figure out why I couldn’t get the XComposite extension to show up under the fbdev X driver under QEMU.  It took until Sunday night to figure out that I need the cirrus fbdev kernel driver along with turning on xdpyinfo, libXcomposite, and the Cirrus X driver in buildroot.  I added xcompmgr as a package to buildroot too, to see what what would happen if I ran it under Matchbox and QEMU.  Turns out nothing happens.  At least not yet.  But now I have a QEMU configuration that will allow me to experiment with Matchbox’s menus to get alpha blending working.

All this because I can’t afford the BeagleBoard yet.  The more I can get done under QEMU the better.  I’m dying to get my hands on the hardware, but that will have to wait for about a month.  The cars need tires this month.

I also tried to build OpenBox to see if it might be a better alternative to Matchbox.  But it didn’t want to compile without a lot of work.  I don’t know why, but I think I prefer Matchbox’s simplicity.  I’d rather extend Matchbox than patch OpenBox to get what I need working.  I’m sure OpenBox is a fine window manager.  But starting simple has always been a modus operandi for me.