iz2jffs v5

Note, there's a bunch of releases here.  The most recent is down at the bottom.

It took a while, but I finally came to my senses and realized I was never gonna get around to everything on my todo list.  So I decided to patch together whatever good stuff I could find from the last 9 months and roll a new iz2jffs release.  It still looks a whole lot like like the v4 release, but there are actually quite a few changes under the hood.  Thanks to the new upx many of the executables are smaller, and quite a few have also been updated or improved in some small way.  I used up a little bit of the extra space so I could include dvtm and my sel file selector based "album" script for handy command line mp3 playing.  There's currently about 640K free on the jffs, which is plenty big enough to experiment with some more new goodies.

Here's a quick picture.  Hey look, is that 30GB free on the SD card?  Nice!  The 32GB class 10 Sandisk card I recently acquired seems to work just fine so far...

Here's my first try:
iz2jffs-e5.tgz

Heh.  That one didn't last very long.  I updated a few more programs for about 800K free:
iz2jffs-e5.1.tgz

And then I fixed the gmenu2x battery monitor, changed the input.conf file to include key bindings from slug's jffs, and made it a wee bit smaller so I now have 820K free:
iz2jffs-e5.2.tgz

And if anyone else actually tries it out, feedback can only make it better.  Based on Dronz's feedback I made yet another build with my forgotten LED fix, even more upxed executables, and a smaller (DejaVuSans) font file that I also found to be more readable.  The jffs now has over 900K free!
iz2jffs-e5.3.tgz

I replaced the useless gmenu2x touchscreen code with a semi functional wifi indicator and switched to the smaller Bepa-Roman.ttf font file for 920K free.
iz2jffs-e5.4.tgz

Uh oh.  I think I may have left out the font from that last one.  Yikes!  Hopefully I got it into this next one.  I also added an updated imgv viewer and patched the gmenu2x file explorer to let me select a directory with the spacebar and pass that to imgv.  Then I can quickly cycle through all the pictures in that directory with imgv using the n and p keys, or s for a slideshow.  And while I was working on the explorer code, I also removed the restriction that would only let you run programs with certain gp2x executable file extensions.  So now you can launch anything.  Be careful with that.
iz2jffs-e5.5.tgz

For the next build I made some overdue cosmetic changes.  I replaced the ugly SD card and Speaker icons on the bottom bar, and tweaked the wifi script so the wifi bars will show up right after you connect.  I also added slightly modified versions of Dronz's new alarm script and micro SD refresh app.  I'd still like to fix the Ctrl-c handler in the alarm app and figure out how to make it use the space-bar to quit in addition to the q key.
iz2jffs-e5.6.tgz

After testing the alarm script this overnight I decided to tinker with the display.  Now it's centered, with the current time up top where it's easy to find since that's what I want to check in the middle of the night.  I also figured out how to use the space and esc keys to quit.  Afterward I experimented with flipclock for the display.  It works, but I need to tweak it to display and possibly control the alarm setting.  Altogether it's not yet enough to warrent another release, but here's the current incarnation of the alarm script if you want to try it.

All the nice internet radio options got me wanting an easy way to change the volume without leaving gmenu2, so I finally decided to fix it up right for the zipit.  I replaced the broken volume and cpu speed settings with separate working headphone and speaker controls using the zipit volume buttons (ctrl-volume for the speaker).  I also replaced the start and select button images so the help messages almost match the zipit key bindings.  Check out the cute little zipit key in the Radio selector.  I added an AudioCheck selection that you can use to turn off the radio, or test the alarm beep volume.

iz2jffs-e5.7.tgz

I was on a bit of a roll there for a while, but all good things must come to an end.  I made a few more changes and then got distracted by the flipclock app and an SDL file manager program, so this next one may be it for a while.

I noticed the gmenu2x volume controls were starting up at -1, and all of the audio scripts contained "alsa started" tests.  So I decided to waste another second during startup and launch setup-alsa-sh from the Zcovery script.  I also added some commented out gmu and rockbox launchers in Zcovery to show how to tweak the jffs for a dedicated internet radio device that starts playing right away, or a car audio player that's easier to get going while you're behind the wheel.  I have one of each myself.

While I was in the Zcovery script I decided to pre-rotate all 4 of the consoles during startup.  This got me thinking about the mpg1234tty4 script and the way it works in gmenu2x.  The radio app launches mpg123 into a background process (on tty4) so I thought it might be better to use the gmenu2x dontleave option.  I tried it, and it came out looking much cleaner, but I noticed I could no longer change the channel.  It turned out the gmenu2x dontleave code had a bug that would add params (the new channel) to the end of the existing command line instead of starting over from scratch.  Thus mpg123 would always start up working on the first channel selected and not the new channel.  I fixed the bug and now the radio app is better than ever.

However rockbox and gmu were now more difficult to use because they use internal software volume controls and expect the main volume (or Headphone volume) to be set high.   So I edited their startup scripts to temporarily set the Headphone volume to 95% so they can maintain their own internal volume settings from session to session.  The scripts restore the gmenu2x headphone settings when the apps exit.

In addition, I made a few more cosmetic changes.  Dronz supplied the Black Gloss theme, and I read the mtpaint documentation on layers and transparency so I could clean up the button images I made earlier.  I also decided to reuse the old about icon for the new help app since it was a bit cleaner and they were quite similar otherwise.

iz2jffs-e5.8.tgz

Did I just say 5.8 would be the last one for a while?  Oops.   Apparently I was mistaken.  I was reviewing all the new help text when I suddenly remembered that gmenu2x has it's own set of help functions that might also have some utility.  So the first thing I did was pipe the mpg123 messages from the radio app through a tee and into a log file.  I hooked the log file up to the help info function on the radio app, so now I can check the recently played song list without ever leaving gmenu2x.   Since the help icon that appears on the bottom bar has an i (for info?) I added the i key to the input.conf file.  And while I was in there I also added the missing inc and dec keys so I can twiddle the color numbers in the skin settings dialog.

The next thing I tried to do was to hook up the rockbox help file to the rockbox app, but that file is html and all the tags made it nearly unreadable in the readme dialog.  So I patched gmenu2x to pass .html help files through a sed filter and strip out most of the html tags before opening up the readme dialog.  Hmm, maybe someday I'll replace the odd gmenu2x manual file support with some limited html support instead...

Anyhow, once that was working I attempted to use the full help.html file.  But that file uses latin15 character coding and gmenu2x only likes utf8, so I whipped up a simple on the fly converter and also fixed it to expand tab characters into  multiple spaces.  It's not perfect.  The html sed filter mangles the euro character (it looks ok in a .txt file).  The help text for the < and > keys also gets mangled by the html sed filter.  Plus the expanded tabs will never look quite right with a proportional space font (maybe I'll implement a pseudo fixed width font mode for the readme files).  But overall I'd say it's readable, and possibly even somewhat helpful.

I also replaced the clunky gmenu2x onscreen keyboard code with slug's patch supporting the real zipit keys, and then enhanced that with the pspmaps code for the Latin15 keymap.

I'll post the new stuff soon.  Gotta play with it a bit more and then wrap it all up.

Then maybe I'll start digging into links again.  I couldn't find the back button in text mode.  So I'd like to match up the text mode and graphics mode keys better, maybe pull in slug's zoom patch, and see if I can possibly replace the built in png font with ttf.

iz2jffs-e5.9.tgz

I made a few small changes to make sampling internet radio work better with the links browser.  Then I merged Dingux Commander into gmenu2x and decided it was enough of an enhancement to roll one more release.  You can read that story in a more recent post above.  Meanwhile, here's the goods.

iz2jffs-e5.10.tgz

Unfortunately the old manual install instructions are now obsolete, unless you can obtain the IZ2S 2.05 zip from the internet wayback machine.  However you can install this on a stock zipit the easy way with flashstock.

If you're looking to install this from a uboot zipit, or one with the openzipit kernel, check out the readme file in the flashback package for instructions.  You can find flashback in Dronz's stuff near the bottom of the goodie bag.

Update:

After some time away, I couldn't resist and made another release:

iz2jffs-e5.11.tgz