Version 0.6.0 of the Linux framebuffer patch to povray-3.6.1 for Unix
is available for download here:

http://pov4grasp.free.fr/download/povray-3.6.1-fb-0.6.0.diff.bz2

	List of changes from version 0.5.0:

- add support for mosaic preview with special handling of dithering
- add support for drawing vista boxes on top of the background image
- add 'v' keypress to toggle display view and terminal scrollback
- add 'p' keypress to toggle rendering | pause mode (no cpu usage)
- add capability to dump the screen after the render is finished
- add support for /dev/vc/0 (devfs); falls back to /dev/tty
- fix colormap saving failure with newer fb drivers (2.6.x kernel)
- fix the vt switch handler to always try restoring the new colormap
- fix pessimistic use of Error() for colormap and vt switch handling
- fix pixel retrieval to uniformly use the colormap (paletted modes)
- fix the screen dump to wait while switching to another console
- fix fb detection order: now $FRAMEBUFFER > /dev/fb/0 > /dev/fb0
- fix $FRAMEBUFFER to not fail with Error() but to try other devices
- fix display geometry parser to accept offset without dimensions
- fix unwanted re-init of the display for each frame in animations


	A generic linux povray binary is also available here:

http://pov4grasp.free.fr/download/povray-nc-0003.bz2

Download the file, unpack it with 'bunzip2 povray-nc-0003.bz2' and set its
executable permission with 'chmod +x povray-nc-0003'.

The binary includes the unix frontend patch described in this thread:
http://news.povray.org/431c914d@news.povray.org
It has support for the X Window display but comes without SVGAlib display
(the current patch is meant to replace SVGAlib in the future).  The binary
was compiled with the Intel C++ compiler to take advantage of Pentium 4
optimizations.  It should however work on any other platform as well.


	Notes:

One handy new feature of this release is the possibility to hide and
show the on-screen displayed image in order to be able to inspect the
console text behind.  Until this release, pressing the Shift+PageUp
and Shift+PageDown keys would scroll back/forward the console text
(default Linux console behaviour) and therefore trash the display.
With this release, this so-called scrollback is disabled unless the
display is temporarly hidden by pressing the 'v' key.  This feature
saves the screen content under the display; in some cases (e.g. if
POV-Ray prints warnings when the render completes) the buffer might
contain outdated screen data.  This limitation should be solved in
later releases.

Since POV-Ray keeps rendering the image and printing text statistics
on the screen, it forces a forward text scrolling.  With fast renders
this makes the console scrollback capability somewhat useless.  To help
looking at the console text in such situation, as well as to temporarly
give up CPU usage for other tasks running for instance on another
virtual console, it is now possible to pause/resume the render with
the 'p' keypress.  As an example, to look at valuable off-screen info
as long as necessary, one can first press 'v' to hide the display and
allow for text scrollback, then 'p' to pause the render, and Shift+PageUp
to scrollback the console text.

Note that switching to another virtual console and switching back to
the console where POV-Ray is running has the effect to loose the text
buffer, i.e. the text scrollback feature does not work anymore.  This
is a known limitation of the Linux console.

A sample image for mosaic preview and vista boxes drawing can be found
in p.b.i under the same subject.


	Installation instructions for the source patch:

1) copy the file linked above to the parent directory of the povray-3.6.1/
    directory (source distribution only).  The povray source distro that you
    intend to patch should be the official release.

2) IMPORTANT: if you already applied a previous version of this patch,
    you must unpatch the povray sources first with the *old* patch, e.g.

% bzcat povray-3.6.1-fb-0.5.0.diff.bz2 | patch -p0 -f -R

3) patch the povray-3.6.1/ sources:

% bzcat povray-3.6.1-fb-0.6.0.diff.bz2 | patch -p0 -f

    and ignore the possible warnings (in principle they are harmless).

4) cd to povray-3.6.1/ and run the ./bootstrap script.  This requires
    having the GNU autotools installed, i.e. autoconf and automake.

5) run './configure && make check' as usual.


	- NC

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