A New Low

The original point of cramming tiny things into the jffs on the zipit was to replace the obsolete (and possibly broken) stock firmware with something useful.  I recently broke out of my "shrinking things" mindset for a while and had a few useful thoughts on this.  It turns out I haven't done much of anything with the tiny /mnt/ffs/Zipit2 script.  I only made that script to fool the init system in the ram disk so it wouldn't initiate the infinite "update of doom" loop.  However, I realized it's actually a nice safe place to add some customization to the boot process because it's the very last bit of script that gets run on boot up.  Currently it just prints a short message and drops into a shell.  But it could just as well launch right into rockbox, or gmu, or check if the SD card has some extra goodies to beef up the system via softlinks.

In order to customize the Zipit2 script without an SD card I felt a simple (but tiny) text editor was required for the jffs.  Now I admit the stock busybox comes with vi, which I can usually remember enough about to get the job done (barely).  But think of the children!  And so I was back to "shrinking things".  To fit on the jffs the programs must be tiny.  At only 14K the e3 editor weighs in at just about the right size.  Plus, depending on the name you run it as, it can emulate the basic commands of wordstar, nedit, pico/nano, vi, or emacs.  Wooo, emacs FTW!  Here's a picture of me using e3 in emacs mode, editing the Zipit2 script to run Rockbox on boot up.

 While I was searching for tiny editors, I just happened to stumble upon the pmirc script (for the busybox ash shell no less) in the puppy linux forums.  I'd already built a 37K version of tinyirc, but at about 2K compressed pmirc was simply too small to pass up.  Plus its got lots of good ideas I can borrow to pimp up the other scripts I've been whipping up.  I modified it a bit to work better with the stock zipit busybox, and tweaked the key input make things a bit easier on the tiny zipit keyboard.  I might have to scour the old software archives to see in there's any similar scripty gems in the floppy linux distributions.  So far most of the potential goodies I've seen are riddled with bashisms, but if I dig deep enough I know I'll find some nuggets.  I'm pretty sure I've got a box of 5 inch floppies somewhere with the ancient simtel archives...

Here's an e3 package with all the softlinks and wrapper scripts.  I also threw in the modified pmirc and Zipit2 script.  You can also use e3 with iz2s, but you'll have to create the softlinks at runtime like in the iz2s busybox.sh script.

iz2jffs-e3.tar.bz2