When it Rains it Pours

The PDF reader got me thinking about ereaders in general.  I've tried FBreader on the on the eee-pc and thought it was pretty decent, but I'm not quite ready for the massive effort required to build the DirectFB version of GTK I'd need to run that.  Someday though...

So I looked around for a somewhat lighter ereader and found greader2x.  It only does txt files (and zipped txt files) but the build requirements seemed reasonable.  Well, I quickly realized that it needed the SDL_mixer lib for the built in music player, and that needed a different mpeg lib than the mpg123 I already had.  Fortunately I found a patch file on the net to convert it over to mpg123.  So I pressed on and built the lib and the greader2x executable.  It seems to work ok.  The music player is underwhelming compared to rockbox or gmu, but it played the few mp3s I tried on it.  Here it is, displaying the readme file that comes with it.  Simulated night reading with "oldbook" theme...

And here's the files:

greader2x-iz2s.zip

You'll need to fetch the GMU package for the codecs if you want music, and to be honest you may need it to run just the ereader part.  I haven't actually tried it by itself.