Memorial Day

I really like the English version of the latest jffs dronz put together!  It's got just about everything I want on the zipit.  But I did make a few changes over the Memorial Day holiday.

First I fixed a tinyirc bug so it no longer wraps the status bar when using the large 8x14 font.  I tend to use a smaller font so I didn't notice the bug right away.  Sorry.

Then I went to work, making it just a wee bit more user friendly, at least for me.  I'm starting to appreciate gmenu2x as a program launcher, so I wanted that available right away on boot up, with no extra work.  At first I tried to get it going from the Zcovery startup script, using the toybox nohup to work around a problem with the hangup signal.  (Just like we did in olden days with the dialup modems).  But nohup wants to redirect stdout, which is troublesome for text terminal programs launched from gmenu2x.  So instead I simply fixed the bin/gmenu script to trap sighup just like on slug's jffs.  No more hangups means I can launch from the Zcovery startup script.  Yay!

With that problem solved, I modified Zcovery to first start a shell prompt in the background on tty1, then switch to tty2 to run gmenu2x.  Works like a charm.  But I'm pretty old school, so I want to get at that command prompt on tty1 at least half of the time.  To make it easy to switch between gmenu2x and tty1 I modified the three keymap files so ctrl-alt-home always goes to the command line shell on tty1.  I'm not actually sure I got this right in the calculator keymap, but I may try to eliminate the calculator keymap someday by remapping the keys inside the script like I did with zcalc.  Then I'd only need to maintain two keymaps.  Anyhow, ctrl-alt-home should work from gmenu2x or any SDL or text program launched by gmenu2x.  Then alt-rightarrow will get you to the gmenu2x text screen on tty2 and another alt-rightarrow will get you to it's graphics screen on tty3.  Sometimes the gmenu2x graphics remain on the screen after ctrl-alt-home, but you can clear that by typing cls or by pressing alt-rightarrow then alt-leftarrow to go to the gmenu text screen on tty2 and back to the command shell on tty1.  In this setup, SDL programs tend to run the graphics on tty3, leaving the text screen on tty2 in limbo.  With gmu and links you can type ctrl-z and bg on tty2 to free up the shell, however this is not advisable when running things from gmenu2x as it wants to manage both tty2 and tty3 for it's program launching scheme.

Once things were working satisfactorily, I decided to Americanize a few settings.  I changed the timezone file and switched the time format in the clock and alarm scripts to 12 hour time with no seconds because that's what I use here.  Since 99.9% of the time I only read things in English on the internet, I decided to compile an ASCII only version of links with SSL to save 200k on the jffs.  I'm seriously considering using the much smaller SSL-free ASCII only version to save even more.  I can always keep a full version of links on the SD card.  I also removed the green gmenu2x background.  I'd prefer to simply replace the wallpaper file if I ever get tired of the blue one.  That saves a few more K.

I used all that saved space to add the rockbox executable and a single codec to the jffs.  The rest of the codecs are softlinks to the jffs addon pack (or the normal IZ2S rockbox package) on the SD card.  Yeah, I know... rockbox doesn't really make any sense on the jffs because you still need an SD card for the music files, but I'm smitten by the coolness factor of it all.  Actually, now that I'm hooked on multiple ttys I may need to build a new rockbox executable because the current one doesn't realize it's supposed to give up drawing things when I switch to tty1.

 

Stock zipit boots into gmenu2x and plays the zipit sound in rockbox with no SD card.

There's still more Americanizing to do.  The gmenu2x glinks app file sends the browser to the french portal by default.  I'm OK with that for now, because it points to lots of handy zipit friendly internet sites.  I also need to switch a few other things like the gmenu2x settings tab to english.  But I think I'd like to get a build out there now because I like the new boot sequence so much.

In the future I still want to try swapping MatrixSSL into links instead of OpenSSL.  And I'd like to switch to slug's gmenu2x sources, then hookup the wifi icon and paste in the IZ2S battery monitoring code that I used for rockbox.  Both of these efforts should save considerable jffs space.  I also want to add the new set timezone script to the initial boot sequence.  Then maybe I'll get back to bunjallo for a browser choice somewhere between links and retawq in size and functionality.  Or maybe I'll see if it's possible to dim the status LEDs (like the backlights) or just turn them completely off when the alarm clock is running.  They're way too bright for night time.

I also need to figure out a better way to organize the goodie bag.  Dronz has been busy adding everything, which is great, but now there's so much in there I can't remember what it all is.  I'm not sure what would help.  Short descriptions?  Dates?  Pointers back to the original blog posts?  Gotta think about it...


Here's the Americanized jffs.  iz2jffs-v4-en.tgz
The old install instructions should suffice.

Here's the new keymap files with src, plus the new gmenu, tinyirc, and Zcovery.  That should make it easy to update the French version.  gmenu-jffs-fixes.zip

I forgot to include the tinyirc source code with the fixes the so I'll pastebin tinyirc.c

Teeny TinyIRC

In the comments of the previous blog post you'll find a bunch of goodies from dronz.

 

His latest iz2jffs setup attempts to squeeze gmenu2x, gmu, glinks, rockbox, and some handy scripted dialogs for multiple wifi profiles and system configs.  I was able squeeze out a little more space by reconfiguring the libs and now I'm tinkering with the rest.

For starters, as seen above, dronz prefers tinyirc to pmirc because tinyirc keeps your keyboard input isolated on a separate line so you don't get mixed messages when someone else is posting at the same time.  Ok, I can see where that might be helpful when composing a long line of text.  But pmirc squishes down to only 2K on the jffs.  At nearly 40K, tinyirc never seemed all that tiny to me.  So I went to work.  First I weaned it off ncurses and switched to ANSI escape sequences for the few simple screen drawing tricks.  That got the executable down around 17K which is much closer to what I'd consider "tiny". 

Once that was out of the way I figured I should probably take the time to zipitize it to make it more useable.  First I fixed it to stop scrolling blank lines whenever it received a PING message.  That was driving me nuts, slowly scrolling the real messages up and off the top of the tiny zipit screen.  Then I added the home, end, pgup, pgdn, and arrow key support to complement the emacs style line editing keys and make composing messages easier on the zipit.  I also added a -t command line switch to turn on message timestamps, and a ctrl-t key to toggle them on or off at runtime.  Finally I added a splash of color; red for errors, magenta for JOIN messages, and green for my messages because all the cool IRC clients have color, even lowly pmirc.

Here you can see my colorful JOIN.  And if you look real carefully, you can also see that I toggled timestamps on just before the JOIN.  If the channel is quiet you can tell if timestamps are on by the uppercase Z after the TinyIRC release number on the status bar.  A lowercase z means timestamps are off.

 I still need to edit the boot scripts to register an IRCNICK environment variable (maybe in ~/.bashrc).  That way I won't keep getting a 30 second countdown to pick a new NICK whenever I startup tinyirc.  Actually I need to edit all the scripts anyhow since they're currently all in french...

Here's the modified source and the smaller tinyirc executable: tinyirc.zip

Putting Links on a Diet

I got a bit ahead of myself (skipping a few stops on the roadmap) and compiled a bunjalloo executable for IZ2S.  It doesn't do anything but segfault right now, probably hitting one of those pesky uclibc bugs.  I'll have to shake that out one of these days, but I should probably stick to the original plan before attempting it.

However, I did discover something very interesting.  The size of the executable.  It came out to right around 250K upxed.  That's really, really small compared to the 2+MB upxed links executables that I've been building.  This got me thinking again about how to put links on a diet.  I know OpenSSL is significantly heavier than MatrixSSL.  But the built in font contributes most of the links bloat.  Bunjalloo gets by with only one size (small) font containing only ASCII characters as far as I know.  On the tiny zipit screen that's probably good enough.  If you think about it, the text mode of links does exactly that.

Now, I already knew the enormous font_include.c file was just a bunch of png files shoveled into C code.  But after some digging around I finally realized the graphics subdirectory contains the actual png glyph files and source to the generate_font program which created font_include.c.  Jackpot!  I pruned the glyph files down to just the basic Latin15 codes and some extra punctuation glyphs and then ran generate-font.  Next I rebuilt links with the new slimmer font_include.c and voila!  The upxed executable is almost megabyte lighter.

I tested it on some ebooks and a few websites.  So far It seems to have all the glyphs I typically run into, except for some unusual arrow characters on slashdot that weren't in the original font anyhow.  It's definitely a step up from retawq on the jffs.

I'm now positive I can get a upxed build of links (with graphics) slimmed down to less than a megabyte.  Some of the options I might try are:

•     Only one font (no monospace text)
•     No bold characters
•     ASCII only (no Latin15)
•     MatrixSSL instead of OpenSSL
•     No SSL.

Here's my first attempt, weighing in at about 1.6MB:  links-sdl-latinonly.zip

That should free up a whole bunch of space on the rockbox/links iz2jffs distro variant...

For the gmenu2x/gmu iz2jffs I save 200K right off the bat by using the existing jpeg, png, and libz shared libs required by gmenu2x instead of the static libs.  I can get another 150K by retiring retawq.  And I think removing the bold characters buys 200-300K.  If I rebuild gmenu2x without libfreetype (using the code from slug's github?) I think it all might just fit.  For now I just went only ASCII only, no bold, and no SSL for a 750K quick and dirty retawq replacement on the gmenu2x/gmu iz2jffs system.

links-iz2jffs-gmenu2x.tar.bz2

I'll try to put SSL and such back in after I see how the new gmenu2x build goes...

The Return of Zpub

While comparing the screenshots of glinks and bunjalloo, I was reminded of my old zpub post.  At the time I hadn't really dug into the links code very much, so I just sorta settled for a so-so reading experience.  I'd thought the epub text in glinks was somewhat small and ugly compared to netsurf.  But since netsurf requires the "mouse" I was a bit aprehensive about using it for an ereader.  I also remembered that dronz had tweaked his glinks config for ereading, so I decided to do a little experimentation with zpub and glinks.

The first change I made was to bump up the text size to something closer to the fonts used in a typical paperback book.  I'm pretty happy with an html-user-font-size setting of 18, but 16 is also not too shabby.  With the larger font, it makes sense to reduce the html-margin setting to 1 character to waste a minimal amount of space on the sides.  To bad you can't set it to 1 or 2 pixels.

While I was working on the margins I decided to see what I could do about that big fat ugly scroll bar.  The default G_SCROLL_BAR_WIDTH setting in setup.h is 12 pixels, which is extremely wasteful on the zipit.  Simply reducing it by 4 pixels gives me another full line of text with a font size of 18.

The other thing that really bugs me about glinks is the ugly default battleship gray background color.  You can change the colors of the menus, status bars, and even the scroll bar, but the html page background color must be set with in the document with a <body bgcolor="#FFFFDD"> tag or else you get the hard coded default_bg_g color from the default.c file.  I may try to code up an html-default-bgcolor command line and config file option to set this at runtime, but for now I just compiled in a yellow tinged off white color #FFFFDD that reminds me an old paperback book.

Another thing I noticed was the occasional odd characters in the text. Turns out the books I fetched from Project Gutenberg are utf8 formatted. I wouldn't be surprised if all epub documents are utf8.  Gotta review the specs someday.  Anyhow, I simply added the html-assume-codepage utf8 setting to the zpub script and now all is right with the text.  Check it out.

Remember how it used to look?  The new look is sooo much more warm and inviting, and actually displays even better on the zipit itself because the hardware rotated screen orientation washes out some of the yellow and possibly better matches my glinks subpixel anti-aliasing orientation setting.  Compare to this.

Gotta see if I can add that links command line option, then get the goodies posted and resume work on the bunjalloo code.

Update:  That turned out to be pretty easy, just a few ifdefs in the default.c file.  But now I've got a few more ideas.  I read about a third of the "Little Fuzzy" novel last night, and when I put down the zipit I realized the links bookmark system is probably inadequate for ereading.  I'd really like to save the scroll bar position so I can resume where I left off.  I'm gonna see if I can use the M and R keys to Memorize and Recall a scroll bar bookmark.  I might also look into defining the L and D keys in links to Lighten and Darken the LCD backlight for an adjustable day or night reading experience.  Either that or I'll have to setup the keymap so I can switch to another virtual terminal to adjust the lights and maybe check the battery level.

Update 2:  I finally finished reading my first full e-novel on the zipit and I can honestly say the experience was actually better than a paperback book in one way because I was able to pocket the zipit and take it with me.  I did find and fix a bug in zpub during my test read that briefly prevented me from viewing the 2nd half of the novel.  The M and R key scrollmark patch was fairly simple, and really made it easy to put down the zipit and pick it up again later to continue reading.  I decided against patching dimmer keys into links because that should be done at a system level so all apps can benefit.  I just need to work out which key combos make sense for all apps.

Here's the updated IZ2S zpub and links executables:  zpub2-iz2s.zip

Here's the modified links sources:  links-sdl-iz2s-zpub.tar.bz2
Here's a comprehensive patch for links-2.3 on the zipit:  links-2.3-zipit.patch

And here's a patch with just the ereading modifications.  http://pastebin.com/weJbzHWT

A jffs version will come later.  I need to make a zpub-lite that works without bash, and bc.  And I'll either have to provide a mini unzip executable, or build zpub-lite as an executable so I can use zlib. Maybe another mcb...

Moving Forwards

I finally posted the source code for the links browser with all my changes in the Friday the 13th blog entry.  Phew!  What a relief it is to get that done.

In the meantime, I've made some real progress on bunjalloo.  I read through all of the display code and consulted with some online docs about the NDS "main" and "sub" screens, their features, and operating modes.  Once I had it all marked up with comments, and thought I had a fair understanding of what was going on, I started making some changes to the code.

First I replaced all the occurrences of hard coded NDS screen sizes with SCREEN_WIDTH and SCREEN_HEIGHT.  Then I redefined those to match the Zipit screen size of 320x240, and tweaked the size of an opengl texture to accommodate the larger width.  This got me a double sized zipit screen display like this.

But I can only display the bottom "main" screen on the zipit so next I tweaked the SDLHandler.cpp code to use a single screen sized SetVideoMode() call, and tweaked the mouse button code to match the new screen size.  That gave me something like this, which should work on the zipit.

I really like the way bunjalloo can rotate the bottom toolbar around the screen to the right side as seen above.  It can also hide the toolbar so it doesn't obscure anything at all.  The scroll bar looks nice while using a minimal amount of screen real estate.  For comparison here's glinks displaying the same web site.  It's clearly more sophisticated than bunjalloo, but did they really have to make all the widgets so hideous?  Just look at that scroll bar.  It's the orthopedic shoe of scroll bar widgets.

I also double checked http:\\m.gmail.com to make sure I could still retrieve my gmail on the reduced zipit sized screen.  It's a bit slower than I'd like, but seems to work.

Unfortunately, in it's current form the bunjalloo code is still wasting considerable time and effort updating the video buffers for the "sub" screen even though it's no longer displayed.  This still needs work.  However, the (shared lib) bunjalloo executable is currently about 700K on x86 ubuntu (250K upxed).  That's significantly smaller than glinks, so I might just find a use for this when I'm all done.  Here's a roadmap of what I'm planning to do with it if all goes well.

• Compile without the WAF (python) build system.  Done
• Remove hardcoded NDS screen size numbers.  Done
• Change the SDL screen size to fit zipit screen.  Done
• Replace all opengl code (and unwanted libs) with one SDL Blit.  Done
• Remove unused SDL_mixer audio code from SDLHandler.cpp  Done
• Eliminate drawing to the emulated NDS upper "sub" screen.
• Remove (ifdef?) "sub" screen datastructs, leaving only "main" screen code.
• Fix SDL kbd code to use unicode field, and make it more responsive.
• Add support for ENTER, BS, ESC keys from real kbd on kbd gui.
• Add link navigation via tab, shift-tab, and enter keys instead of z2mouse.
• Consider changing arrow keys (and others) to match glinks keybindings.
• Create real makefiles in all source code directories.
• Build on Zipit.
• Optionally link bunjallo cache dir to /tmp/bunjalloo/cache for jffs.
• Try to build it without libstdc++ (to reduce exe size).
• Try other build options to reduce exe size for a better fit on the zipit jffs.

I've put the code onto my github site so you can see what's changed from the original sources.

Had another thought.  If I repackage my gmenu2x/gmu jffs distro to supplement retawq with bunjalloo I might get a better fit with a shared libstdc++ since I'll have 2 apps using it.  Something to think about...