Small, but Spicy

To save space on the zipit jffs, I made some small (but spicy) SALSA builds of amixer and alsamixer to replace the bloated static full ALSA build of alsactl from IZ2S.  That change freed up 200K on the jffs and eliminated a second or 2 from the ALSA setup part of the boot process.  Apparently the lean and nimble amixer program enables the sound much quicker than the fat old alsactl beastie.  The salsa version of alsamixer forces you scroll off to the right through the controls for quite a few screens before you get to the good stuff, but other than that it works pretty well.  As you can see in this screenshot of me, preparing to turn down the zipit speaker from it's ear blasting default of 100%.

While I was at it, I also compiled a shared lib version of the own-tty program for a 150K savings over the static IZ2S build.   The new one is only 4K.  Nice!

Meanwhile, upon further testing I discovered the pmirc script from last week had quite a few runtime requirements for utility programs only available in the busybox upgrade from the IZ2S.  Oops.  So I set about hacking the script to eliminate some unneeded utilities, and building the others.  After some time relearning sed and regular expressions, I managed to replace tr, cut, and clear with sed and ANSI escape codes.  I built a much smaller 11K shared lib version of nc to replace the big static build from IZ2S.  To make things easier for me I adjusted the help messages to fit the zipit screen, and tossed in a tiny telnet wrapper script.  (I also built a small 7K copy of NetKitty but haven't done anything with it yet.)  I've been searching for a while, and finally found a tiny 5K non-busybox version of the date program on the internet.  I modified it a teeny bit to add /etc/TZ file handling for local timezone formatting.  This lets pmirc timestamp it's log files with the local time.  I still gotta make a setup script with well known city name hints so it's easier to get the right setting into the /mnt/ffs/etc/TZ file.  Here you can see annonymous zipit_user_20645 using the 5K new pmirc utility on the jffs to join the #zipit chat group.  Probably just gonna lurk for a while...

While I was working on the date program I also built a tiny 5K cal program so I can now run the entire wifitest demo dialog script off the stock busybox.  Plus, someday when I get the gmu sqeezed into the jffs I hope to be able to set aside a zipit to be used as a dedicated alarm clock (internet) radio gizmo.

Anyhow, with both rockbox and the IZ2S busybox upgrade installed, I now have nearly 600K free on the jffs for other goodies.  I'd really like to have the zipit16.mp3 file I rescued from the resources.arl file play the "ZZZZipit!" sound on boot up.  But it's 80K and I've only been able to prune mpg123 down to about 230K, so that's unlikely for the time being.  I'm considering upxing the 600K wpa_supplicant program from the stock jffs to see if I can squeeze 100K out of it.  And the loadkeys program is also a heavy load.  Wejp went with the much leaner loadkmap on his zipit userland.  It only loads binary keymap files that must be created with loadkeys on a full linux system, but hey, that's another tradeoff I'm willing to make for 200K or so.

New stuff:
mixer-irc.tar.bz2

A New Low

The original point of cramming tiny things into the jffs on the zipit was to replace the obsolete (and possibly broken) stock firmware with something useful.  I recently broke out of my "shrinking things" mindset for a while and had a few useful thoughts on this.  It turns out I haven't done much of anything with the tiny /mnt/ffs/Zipit2 script.  I only made that script to fool the init system in the ram disk so it wouldn't initiate the infinite "update of doom" loop.  However, I realized it's actually a nice safe place to add some customization to the boot process because it's the very last bit of script that gets run on boot up.  Currently it just prints a short message and drops into a shell.  But it could just as well launch right into rockbox, or gmu, or check if the SD card has some extra goodies to beef up the system via softlinks.

In order to customize the Zipit2 script without an SD card I felt a simple (but tiny) text editor was required for the jffs.  Now I admit the stock busybox comes with vi, which I can usually remember enough about to get the job done (barely).  But think of the children!  And so I was back to "shrinking things".  To fit on the jffs the programs must be tiny.  At only 14K the e3 editor weighs in at just about the right size.  Plus, depending on the name you run it as, it can emulate the basic commands of wordstar, nedit, pico/nano, vi, or emacs.  Wooo, emacs FTW!  Here's a picture of me using e3 in emacs mode, editing the Zipit2 script to run Rockbox on boot up.

 While I was searching for tiny editors, I just happened to stumble upon the pmirc script (for the busybox ash shell no less) in the puppy linux forums.  I'd already built a 37K version of tinyirc, but at about 2K compressed pmirc was simply too small to pass up.  Plus its got lots of good ideas I can borrow to pimp up the other scripts I've been whipping up.  I modified it a bit to work better with the stock zipit busybox, and tweaked the key input make things a bit easier on the tiny zipit keyboard.  I might have to scour the old software archives to see in there's any similar scripty gems in the floppy linux distributions.  So far most of the potential goodies I've seen are riddled with bashisms, but if I dig deep enough I know I'll find some nuggets.  I'm pretty sure I've got a box of 5 inch floppies somewhere with the ancient simtel archives...

Here's an e3 package with all the softlinks and wrapper scripts.  I also threw in the modified pmirc and Zipit2 script.  You can also use e3 with iz2s, but you'll have to create the softlinks at runtime like in the iz2s busybox.sh script.

iz2jffs-e3.tar.bz2