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