Finch

Shortly after my last post, walrus43 mentioned on the zipit IRC channel that he'd like to get the Finch instant messenger client working on his openwrt zipit.  And he was hoping to accomplish that with the native compiler.  Wow, that's quite a challenge.  I remember that Finch beastie from the trials and tribulations of my IRC client porting days with IZ2S.  At the time I dismissed Finch as far too bloated to even attempt.  It's only C code, but it uses glib, which has a huge list of tricky prerequisites for a uclibc environment.  After several days of fiddling I actually managed to build a finch executable with the native compiler, but I haven't quite got it working with the protocol plugins.  So it's not all that useful in it's current state.  I'll try to finish that up shortly and publish the results, including my fake pkg-config script.

But in the meantime, I switched over to the cross-compiler and a built full working finch package to go along with the libpurple protocol plugin package already available in the zipit openwrt repository.  It's all in git already, but I'm not sure if I have to do any extra steps to force the nightly build system  to recognize the new finch package.  On my local PC I had to do this:

  make package/symlinks
  make menuconfig

Then select the finch package so my next make would build it.

Finch actually runs pretty well, but some of the dialogs are designed for screens taller than a standard  24 or 25 by 80 character terminal.  The default font on slug's openwrt only gives you 20 lines so this can be a bit of a problem.  However it looks like the smaller fonts I created for IZ2S make this workable.  Here's the 30 line preferences dialog with the 5x8iz2s.psf font file.

It might be a good idea to create a wrapper script for finch setup that does this before running finch.

  loadfont < 5x8iz2s.psf

Here's the goodies.  This is my first try.  It works but you may prefer the real ipk file below.

finch-wrt-with-libs.tgz

Unfortunately that finch executable had a bug which caused it to segfault on exit.  I found a defect report on this (#13739) which made it fairly easy to patch, so I rebuilt the finch executable and threw in the smaller IZ2S fonts here.  You still need the libs from the other tarball above.

finch-with-fonts.tgz

The package has arrived, but it doesn't have the smaller fonts or the gmenu2x icon yet.

finch_2.7.11-1_pxa.ipk