Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Where do we go from here?

This blog seems to be running out of steam, or maybe it's just me.  Anyhow, I guess it's time for an update of some sort.  So I'll have to cobble something together to fluff up the word count...

Some ideas to write about include:

Compiling code for the zipit on my chromebook.  That was fun.
Tinkering with voidz linux on the zipit.  Also sorta fun.

My original plan for the chromebook was to use the compiler from chromebrew to make a smallish static dietlibc build of the current movgrab source code to work around a problem with the musl builds.  The chromebook has an arm processor, so many static zipit executables actually run on it, allowing me to test things without having to transfer to the zipit.  More on that here:

https://mozzwald.com/irclog/zipit/2018/05/28

My hopes for dietlibc were many.  It builds smaller static executables than other libc implementations.  It might not have the socket reuse issue I was getting with musl.  And it had a recipe for building a static openssl, something that had eluded me last go around when I made the static uclibc build of movgrab.

I got dietlibc working, and made a static qemacs with it, but the movgrab build never came to fruition.  I suspect it really only works with glibc, and glibc now actively resists static builds.  So I gave up.  But then the voidz linux distro got created for the zaurus and and seemed like it could be a really nice fit on the zipit, with musl and no systemd.  I didn't have a compiler for it, but wanted to give it a test drive.  So I went back to the chromebook and built a set of static executables to let me run the ziptuner.  This tarball has ziptuner, dialog, mpg123, with some config files and scripts.

ziptuner_static_with_dialog_and_mpg123.tgz 

The executables are all static builds that I compiled and tested a bit on the chromebook.  The ncurses setup on the chromebook has issues with terminfo and I remember mpg123 was a bit of a challenge, but I eventually managed to coax some sound out of it. Unzip it into /usr/local on voidz and run ziptune to give it a try.  It might also work on other zipit distros due to the static executables.  For all the trouble it gave me in the build, the mpg123 executable actually runs pretty well on the chromebook.

Here's a shot of the ziptuner compiled and running on voidz.

I'm hoping to try and learn how to turn ziptuner into an actual xpbs package for voidz.  We'll see how it goes.