Christmas Special

Sometime around Christmas rkdavis mentioned something about loading sdlBasic on the stock zipit jffs instead of rockbox.  Since I eventually want gmu on a zipit to be used as a dedicated internet radio, I figured maybe it was a good time to start separating the base jffs goodies from the rockbox stuff.

I also wanted to tinker with the wifi setup scripts.  I really like the easy dialog based EWoC wifi script included in later IZ2S releases, but I don't want to waste 200K of the jffs on the dialog executable.  So I dug deep into the dark old corners of the internet to review what could be done with ANSI escape sequences instead.  I found some really promising stuff and a related book that I'm gonna buy.  

But it proved difficult getting things to work well with the builtin echo command from the stock busybox sh.  And running ANSI escape codes with the external echo or printf commands from the IZ2S replacement busybox was just horribly slow.  So this is all I've got so far:  The previous SSID used shows up in green!  Not pretty, and my horrible photo skills don't help much either, but at least it's a marginal improvement.

Follow the directions from the previous blog post to install the smaller base system.  Then add whatever you want:  sdlBasic, busybox, tinyirc, or anything else that fits... (Hmm, it looks like you'll need to add either the full sed from the original package, or add busybox for its sed, otherwise the wifi scripts won't work.)

iz2jffs-base.tar.bz2

Anyhow, I trimmed down the old sdlBasic to something that I think will fit in the jffs on top of the base system.  I actually had to rebuild the executable because the previous build was pulling in libstdc++ due to my lame makefile.  That would have been 3 megabytes of completely wasted space on the jffs.  With libstdc++ out of the picture, I got all the libs needed for the sdlBasic runtime collected together.  I removed the docs and included only the Beast and Sokoban demos to save space.   Here's a nice blurry pic of me beating up on Sokoban level 1 to convince you that you absolutely must have it.

I personally don't want to mess up the jffs right now on my zipit by replacing rockbox with sdlBasic, so if anyone else tries it be sure to let me know how well (or not) it fits.

sdlbasic-iz2jffs.zip

Meanwhile, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from this tiny stuff, I finally put up a download link for the Emacs I built for IZ2S way back when.  It's so handy, I feel compelled to share it.