Uncontrollable Urges

In the midst of all my utf8 sleuthing I got the urge to revisit my problem using bash (instead of the busybox shell) to type extended characters with the European keymap.  Running loadkeys eurokeymap.map says, "assuming iso-8859-15 euro".  Hmm, 8859...  I went back to Prototypeur, followed the french wikipedia link and finally realized my error...  Ah ha!  That's not utf8.  It's just a full 8bit codepage.  The french wikipedia page is actually clearer than the english version because the compact table layout makes it obvious at a glance that this is single byte encoding.  The english table is bloated and confusing with octal numbers and redundant hex values.  Who really cares about the octal these days?  Octal's about as useful as Roman numerals.  The future belongs to hex.

To make it work I want bash to run 8bit clean instead of 7bit only.  Maybe that'll help for for utf8 too.  Here's how.

Make a .inputrc file in the home directory and put this in it. Or try a global /etc/inputrc file.

# .inputrc controls how programs using the readline library behave.

# This includes bash.

### Make Bash 8bit clean ###

# Enable 8bit input

set meta-flag on

set input-meta on

# Turns off 8th bit stripping

set convert-meta off

# Keep the 8th bit for display

set output-meta on

As if that weren't enough, while all of this was going on I finally got around to packaging up the gmu music player for the jffs.  This came about because a co-worker suddenly decided he was ready for his zipit that I'd promised to deliver (as soon as it was done).  You know how that goes with software.  It's never really done...  Anyhow, I came up with 3 potential configurations for the jffs on this zipit:  rockbox for mp3s and games, gmu for mp3s and internet radio, or mplayer and some simple bash wrapper scripts like these for mp3s, internet radio, and possibly some video.   The gmu choice was selected so I finally put that together with all the required libs.  There's still about 1.2MB on the jffs for extra goodies, so I really need to identify some programs that make use of all those shared libs to get the most bang for the buck...

Meanwhile, in testing the gmu package, I discovered that my latest base jffs was horribly busted.  The timezone script was missing all the /dev/tty0 redirection that's required for scripts run before owntty in the boot sequence.  Oops, that little mistake left you hanging on a blank screen, waiting for you to select a timezone from an invisible list.  Not good.  Here's a replacement timezone script for the 2 people who downloaded the broken jffs base.

tz-iz2jffs.zip

Here's a gmu package suitable for the stock jffs.  I preloaded the playlist with a few stations.

gmu-0.8-iz2jffs.tar.bz2