Remix

With the tiny mcurses build of ttyclock under my belt, I set my sights on some larger targets to mcursify.  First up was the alsamixer.  Even with the salsa rebuild it's still quite large due to the big fat lump of static ncurses embedded in the executable.  I added a few more stub functions to mcurses and made a new 60K (before upx) alsamixer for a savings of 100K.  Not bad, if only it worked.  Segfault!  Rather than wade through the voluminous verbiage of alsa goodness, searching for the offending mcurses function, I decided to look elsewhere for perhaps a smaller starter mixer.  Turns out there's not much out there and most of it predates ALSA, using the earlier OSS mixer controls. 

I like the simple compact look of rexima though.  So I built a 19K  mcurses version, hoping it might just work.  And it did.  Sorta.  It came up with only three controls displayed: PCM, PCM2, and IGAIN.  WTF?  I twiddled them anyhow.  PCM is what it says, the mostly useless master volume control.  PCM2 controled the headphone volume, and I think IGAIN handled the volume for weird zipit microphone input.  With no way to control the tiny zipit speaker, this wasn't gonna work.  Fortunately I went to the net and discovered these are just the default mappings from the emulated OSS mixer to ALSA mixer controls, and you can override them by writing the correct settings to /proc/asound/card0/oss_mixer in your boot up scripts.  On IZ2S and it's derivatives, that place would be at the end of the setup-alsa.sh script.  So I whipped up some changes and settled on the handful of controls I'm likely to use.  I also squeezed the rexima display down to zipit size, and added a splash of mcurses color.

Once I had the emulated OSS mixer under control I thought it might be fun to dig through the old curses music players.  Who knows what sort of nuggets might be in that pile.  I decided to try building the orpheus music player because it claimed make use of mpg123, which is included in IZ2S, and it mentioned internet radio support.  It's internationalized C++ so it's probably too bloated for the jffs.  Because of that I went with a regular ncurses build, after tweaking the screen layout and key bindings with the usual zipit fixes.  It looks ok, and it seems to work, but I don't think it's really what I want.  It did however prove that OSS mixer based programs can be viable on IZ2S.

That's orpheus up top working its way through a funky Eddie Hazel playlist, with rexima mixin it up down below in the bottom dxvt window.

Here's a 21K rexima executable with source (including mcurses) and a modified IZ2S setup-alsa.sh.  You can borrow the new oss settings from the bottom of the alsa script if you want to use this on the jffs.

Curses!

My plans for a cheesy SDL_ttf console font hack are now officially on the backburner.  Too many distractions.  I'll get back to it real soon though, I swear!

The #zipit IRC channel is abuzz with all sort of openwrt chatter.  It's too hard to ignore so I finally got off my butt, took inventory of my messy stack of Micro SD cards, and found one that worked well enough with uboot to load openwrt.  Actually the uboot that came with the flashstock rescue system seems much more robust with the SD cards than I remember.  Maybe it's fixed now.  I'll have to triple check that inventory and see how many, if any, SD cards still fail to boot.

Anyhow, the recent openwrt system from projectgus had a busted wifi setup, so mozzwald posted his test tarball with working wifi and a few extra goodies like gmenu2x and gmu.  It's quite shiny and seems to work pretty well, so I'm gonna have to play with it.  I'm just not sure what to do next.  My git foo is kinda week, so when I got confused trying to clone the code from the projectgus github I switched over to anarsouls instructions and finished the job based on that.  I hope the resulting odd mix of git clone archives is ok.  It's building right now on a slow USB drive hanging off my old PIII laptop, so it should be done cooking by sometime next week.  Then I'll try to build an openwrt version of rockbox and see how that goes.

So what did I accomplish last week?  Err, not much. 

I was a bit bothered that the smallest a static ncurses program will get down to is about 120K.  But the shared lib is over 400K, so I need to find at least 4 ncurses programs that I've just gotta have to make installing the shared lib worth it on the jffs.  A 120k static executable for ttyclock seems excessive.  So I went looking for a mini ncurses alternative to make a smaller clock.  There are actually quite a few out there.  I settled on mcurses because it came with a nice demo program and didn't need too much work to build the ttyclock.  I added a fake "immediate" (as in unbuffered) mode version of the windowed curses functions and it.  I shuffled the ttyclock code a teensy bit to make it work.  Then I added a bunch of patches to add some features and fix the date format bug, plus make it default to ISO 8601 dates instead of whatever weird euro-format it was stuck on.  The resulting executable is around 16K, which puts the static mcurses overhead at about 1/10th of the size you get with ncurses.  I'd call that a win.

Here it is in borderless ISO-date mode, preparing to replace the old standby clock radio.

ttyclock-mcurses.zip

I also finished off the 5x8 font and repackaged dvtm along with the rxvt terminfo files it seems to want.

The rest of the goodies will be posted real soon...

Off Track

I was planning to hack up a cheesy console font version of SDL_ttf this week so I could build some bloat free versions of dgClock, the jlime fileselector, and possibly gmenu2x suitable for squeezing onto the stock zipit jffs.  And then I was gonna attempt to build a skinny version of the retro the maemo flipclock.  But that woulda involved lots of planning and testing, and whatnot.  Instead I got distracted by some shiny new things.
 
I don't remember how, but I was reading something that led me to the dtach utility which led me to the dvtm virtual terminal manager.  Or maybe it was the other way around.  Perhaps I was reading about twin and that led me there.  I don't know.  Anyhow, if you can't give up the jffs space to run gnu screen, then maybe these two lighter utilites are a better fit. 

To get a better idea of what dvtm was capable of I added the line characters to a few fonts that are smaller than the one true 6x10 font I've been using.  Here's a shot of dvtm running with a 5x8 font from the ben nanonote mailing list archive.  I also patched the lines into the atari4x8 font so at least I did something related to fonts...

As if this wasn't enough distraction from my planned activites...  These days everyone and their dog seems to have some version of openwrt running on their zipit.  I got hooked into their discussion on IRC because there's now a version of gmu for openwrt that fits on the openwrt rescue jffs.  It's not as nice as mine because you have to crank it up to 412MHz to beat the skippies.  But still, I should'a been done with my jffs version by now.  Maybe I can still be first with a cool alarmclock radio gmu package.

Meanwhile, due to all the chatter on the zipit IRC channel about openwrt and it's mini versions of everything, I got motivated to try and build a WPA-only version of wpa_supplicant for the jffs.  I didn't quite get there because that's rumored to come out around 50K, and I only got mine down to just over 100K.  It prints a few ioctl warning messages but seems to work so far with the WPA settings on my cheepo home wifi router.  I also got onto an open access point without a hitch, but that's probably cheating. 

If you're daring and need the room on the jffs you can realize quite a savings over the 640k stock wpa_supplicant.  I also built a smaller version of wpa_passphrase but I still don't know exactly what that does, so mine might just do nothing.  In a pinch you can always boot off the SD card and use the full wpa_* utilities from EZ2S to connect to one of those "enterprise" wifi routers that you might see at work.

dvtm-dtach-iz2s.zip
wpa-jffs.zip

Bad Dates

So the new jffs base is barely out for a day and the bug reports are already rolling in.  I included a tiny cal program as a freebie, mostly so I could tinker with the ansi escape menu code on the jffs.  But apparently it prints out bogus calendars, and doesn't even support the vital -m switch to start the metric week off properly on a Monday!  We can't have that.

Actually I was just starting to pull together the various bits needed for the alarm clock portions of my planned internet clock radio package when dronz filed his bug report.  So I suppose I should probably attempt to fix the calendar first. Darn it!  I took a longer look at the code and discovered some obvious problems.  I'm pretty sure January usually has 31 days, not 21.  Even after that fix all the days were still off by 1.  Was time counted differently way back before y2k when this code was probably written?  I can't remember, so maybe it was.

Anyhow, I hacked in the -m setting and fixed enough math errors to get past the end of 2012.  According to the Mayans, the world's supposed to end in 2012 so that's probably good enough.  Right?

Meanwhile I'd really like to get a nice alarm clock running on the zipit before then.  I built a smaller shared lib version of the tty-clock executable from IZ2S.  It's ok for a start, but I'd prefer something really sharp like the retro flipclock they've got on the maemo.  The source is mostly SDL, with a tiny helping of gtk for the alarm sound file selector dialog.  Fortunately the ben nanonote has a tiny fileselector program from the jlime distro that's written in SDL and could work as a replacement for the gtk.  It took a while to get it working because of the uclibc dirclose() segfault that I worked around for sdlbasic, and then promptly forgot about.  It's still there in the IZ2S uclibc though, so I'm sure it'll get me again.  

 The jlime fileselector works pretty well now in IZ2S, but it's a bit large for the jffs because it requires a truetype font and all the bloatware that goes along with that.  I did some searching and discovered the SamyGo folks may have written an SDL_ttf replacement that uses a tiny linux console font instead of truetype fonts.  I couldn't locate the code but I may make a go of that myself, especially with all my recent console font file experience.  I also noticed gnurobbo has a compiler setting to use pixmap fonts instead of SDL_tty, so I might just take a peek at that as well.

If I do manage to produce a substitute lib using the console font I'll probably try to build a mini version of the dgClock program from a previous blog post.  It weighs in at only 18K if I can ditch the 1MB required for SDL_ttf and libfreetype.  It's also quite a bit prettier than the cal program, but I don't know if it has a setting to display the metric version of the calendar.

Here's an updated cal program, with source code so you can fix the math yourself in 2013, if that ever happens.
iz2jffs-cal.zip

Here's the smaller shared lib ttyclock executable and a few alarm scripts to cull for ideas.
ttyclock-jffs.zip

Starting Over, Again.

In my previous blog entry I mentioned a bunch of goodies and ideas provided by dronz just as I was going to press with the blog post.  It took a lot longer than I expected, but I think I've finally got most of it incorporated into a new jffs base.  Originally I expected to break it into a bunch of additions, but as I rummaged through the goodies I realized much of it really belonged in the base jffs package.  So it had to be small.  The first thing I noticed was a proliferation of upxed executables from the original IZ2S and EZ2S systems that simply access a GPIO line to the zipit LEDs and buttons and such.  I figured these presented a perfect opportunity to roll them all into a single multi-call binary (mbc) executable and really save some space.  I was even hoping to toss in the IZ2S power button and screenblanker demons since they access the same GPIOs.

It actually turned out to make the most sense to create 2 mcb executables and leave the demons alone.  The static linked demons were the most efficient with memory at runtime, and don't take up all that much disk space.  Especially considering all the other savings I was getting from the two mcbs.   You can see the two static linked daemons in this htop screenshot, using a mere 16K of resident (RES) memory each while running.

The shared versions use significantly more RES memory, although there is the possibility that some of that will be recovered by sharing (SHR) with more programs running.  Here you can see the shared version of the screenblanker on the blue line with the two original static daemons on the two lines below.

I'm also starting to rethink upx.  It imposes a 4k runtime memory penalty, which is not so bad, but it also starts it's disk compression 4k or so behind the builtin (gzip?) compression on the jffs.  Now upx seemed to win somewhat in my minimal testing on the fairly large busybox and rockbox executables, but it's really hard to be sure when working on a live jffs because you never know when the jffs garbage collection will kick in and throw off all the numbers.  I really prefer to just make the executables tiny and let the jffs compress them.  Here's a shot of the original IZ2S daemons using 4k more memory after being upxed.

To make matters more difficult for me, the original IZ2S daemons were built in an earlier scratchbox environment that's a bit more frugal than the one I'm using.  I've experimented with dietlibc and musl libc to see if I could duplicate some of that frugality with the mcb executables, but the gcc wrapper used by my scratchbox environment conflicts with the gcc wrappers used by dietlibc and musl, to that's gonna take some serious work to get any sort of results.  Oh well.

Anyhow, the new additions from dronz also included some upxed helper utilities such as tee, clear, and date to pull in more functionality such as timezone, and hex passphrase management from the EZ2S network setup scripts.  I set about recompiling tiny shared lib versions of those, as well as replacing the large static sed, grep, and ntpdate programs from IZ2S with dynamic builds of minised, ugrep, and ntpclient for a rather large savings of several hundred K on the jffs.  I also threw in a new setup-tz.sh script to help get a /etc/TZ file generated after a fresh jffs install.

Now if you're off the wifi grid with your zipit, you can still set the time and date either interactively or on the command line with the new date utility.  Simply type date MMDDhhmmYYYY with the appropriate Month, Day, hours, minutes, and Year on the command line, or run /mnt/ffs/bin/date -i to do it interactively.

Also amongst the new goodies were some additions for better sound out of rockbox, however since I'd already ditched the massive alsactl utility in favor of the smaller amixer program these required some changes to the rockbox script to make them work.  I modified things to use amixer and it seems ok now, saving and restoring sound settings in the rockbox script.  I also renamed the original  /mnt/ffs/share/rockbox/eqs/Default.cfg file to Rockbox.cfg and switched to the dronz "hifi" Default.cfg file.  This apparently gets you better sound than the original default eq settings.  However I'm not positive how to activate the eq settings.  If I had to guess, I'd say go into the Settings/Sound/Equalizer menu and select Enable, then Browse to pick the Default config file.

By the way, dronz points out that you can save gobs of space on the jffs by deleting codecs you don't use from the /mnt/ffs/lib/rockbox/codecs directory.  He's got better ears than I, so he deletes the MP3 codec file mpa.codec.  I'd probably go the other way and delete most of the others...

Since I was now committed to remaking the base system I decided to throw in some more font support for the Western European characters.  The /mnt/ffs/share/fonts/erusfont.psf console font has slightly larger glyphs and is thus a bit more legible than the default font.  It may also have more unicode glyphs than the default font.  Feel free to edit the font loading line of the Zcovery script to suit your preference.   You can also load the /mnt/ffs/etc/eurokeymap.kmap instead of the default keymap.kmap.  This keymap provided by dronz allows you to use special key combos to type uincode text with the zipit keyboard.  I had trouble with this in the bash shell on IZ2S (maybe I'm missing some language setting environment variables) but it works pretty well in the busybox sh shell on the jffs.  I also couldn't get the eurokeymap to work in the e3 editor.  However the nano editor handle the unicode typing so I'm providing a separate package for that with a slightly smaller build than the statically linked IZ2S nano executable.

If you wish, you can add more fonts.  I recommend installing non .gz versions of the fonts on the jffs because the base system won't load .gz fonts and the jffs uses gzip compression anyhow, so the file size is effectively the same.

Finally, there's also a set of replacement kernel modules from dronz that you can use to enable auto-repeating keys, so you don't wear out your thumbs quite as fast.

Whew!  That's a big post.  Here's the goods, starting with the new base.  Follow the instructions from the earlier post to install it.
iz2jffs-base-v2.tar.bz2
Oops.  Apparently the new timezone script leaves you at a blank screen.  Here's the fix: tz-iz2s.zip.

The mini Rockbox is now a separate install after the base.

rockbox-391-jffs.tar.bz2
Dronz says:  You can save some space by replacing the default cabview theme with this 4k theme and the 14-Terminus-Bold.fnt font from the rockbox font pack (or this slimmer version of the font Lat15-TerminusBold14.zip).

Here's the typematic keyboard goodies from dronz. 

typematic.zip

And the smaller (shared lib) nano editor.

nano-jffs.zip

This loadkeys program can be used in IZ2S to convert keymaps to the binary .kmap format used on by the jffs base.

loadkeys-kmap.zip

Oh yeah, here's the updated naim IM client that uses the still functioning OSCAR protocol.  I still couldn't tell if it works though...

naim-iz2s.tar.bz2

The handy IZ2S busybox update is still available in here.

iz2jffs-extras.zip

And I still need to wrap up the final version of the source code for the IZ2S mcbs...
Here's the nearly final version of iz2s-pwr-src.tgz just in case i lose track of this...