I Don't Know What I Was Thinking.

Boy, that'll teach me to make promises on Friday the 13th, just before taxes are due.  The taxes got done, but not much else.  And now I'm really having trouble remembering where I stashed all the zipit goodies I promised to make available.  I swear I'll get them posted, real soon now...

In the meantime, whilst avoiding packaging up the old goodies, I somehow found myself on an old Nintendo DS homebrew site, which reminded me of the spiffy Bunjalloo web browser.  It runs quite well (with graphics even) in the limited 4MB and small screen real estate of the NDS.  Plus there's some notes about building it for linux with SDL, and it uses the tiny matrixssl library for shttp connections.  I've been looking for an excuse to use that one, but I'm far too lazy to graft it onto one of the other zipit browsers.  So off I went, merrily avoiding what I should be doing, and attempting to port bunjalloo instead.  Turns out it uses some (python based?) WAF build system that I've never heard of, and a bunch of stuff from the NDS devkitarm toolchain.  Well, python and WAF were quite unhappy with my scratchbox build environment, so I quickly ditched them and moved to script based compiling.  I had to resort to Windows to use the NDS oriented grit tool to convert some png files to .c and .h source code because I'm too lazy to pull down all it's requirements and build a linux version.

Then, just as I was reaching 100% of the sources compiled I ran up against a wall.  Oops, the linux build requires opengl.  Apparently some 2D opengl calls match up well against the native NDS hardware, so an opengl layer makes sense for portability.  But not really for my purposes.  Opengl is not so great for the zipit, with it's conspicuous lack of floating point hardware.  However on closer inspection, it looked like most of the opengl calls were using the integer versions of the functions.  Hmm, that got me thinking.  Apparently I still have a few brain cells left over from olden times, when DSLinux wasn't quite dead yet.  Just before the DSI came out and flatlined the last remaining DSLinux effort, I managed to sneak in a really lame port of the opengl version of the classic Elite space game.  I dug through the archives and sure enough, there was the integer only tiny-SDL-OpenGL lib I used for the port.  I think it needs a few tweaks to make it suitable for bunjalloo, and then there's the whole business of reconfiguring the screen and keyboard code, but the wall has been breached. 

Hopefully bunjalloo doesn't animate or use 100% of the CPU in a busy loop, because the opengl example programs are not exactly top performers.  Here's the well known gears program grinding out a whopping 2 frames per second on the zipit.

The shiny spinning triangle isn't a whole lot snappier.

Hopefully I can continue to restrain myself and not try to port any of my old opengl based CAD programs to the zipit.

 Although this does look almost useable in 320x240 pixels...

Must, resist, temptation...

For your  amusement, here's a zip with the tinygl sources.  The gears and triangle executables are also included in the examples directory. 
tinygl-iz2s.zip

And here's what bunjalloo currently looks like running in the debugger on ubuntu.

As you can see, I have plenty of work to do on the screen layout before I can even attempt to run it on the zipit.

Update:  I dug through the code, looking for all numbers near 256 and 192 (the NDS screen dimensions), and replaced all the 192s with 120 to use a half zipit screen instead of one of the NDS screens.  It sorta works but the scrollbar looks weird constrained to the bottom half of the display.  So I think I really want to make it use only one 240 pixel high screen instead.

I was able to confirm that I can use bunjalloo to access my gmail account (cool!), however hotmail seems to really want javascript.

Latin Lessons (and Other Things)

Wow, it's been over a month since I did any sort of real blog post.  This must be what writers block feels like.  I've been off tinkering with so many different things that it's difficult to put enough coherent thoughts together for a decent post.  After I put up my previous "Where's the Beef?" post, I went back and edited the dead links in all my old posts to redirect them to the "Where's the Beef?" message.  It's quite a relief to be done with that.  But that's just clean up.  Nothing new.

So why am I so scatterbrained?  Well, I'm currently lugging 5 zipits around, all with different stuff on the internal flash.  In addition, I've got a pocket full of micro/mini SD cards with various versions of IZ2S, Flashstock, openwrt, etc.  And the pocket is really rough on the labels I've made for them.  They keep fading or falling off, so I can no longer remember what's on what card.  At least some of the zipit's are still labelled, and I'm testing some of the official zipit skin stickers to see if they're more resiliant, or easier to remember.

Zipit 1.  I finally loaded Mozzwalds openwrt rescue onto a virgin zipit, as a prelude to loading slug's shiny looking gmenu/gmu rescue image.  But now this particular zipit no longer likes any of my SD cards, so I'm back to being disappointed with uboot again.  I could probably leave it at home in a drawer somewhere, but I keep hoping I'll come up with a brilliant plan to restore the blob bootloader and the stock kernel via the wifi.

Zipit 2.  After I gave up on zipit 1, I decided to update a zipit from Mozzwalds initramfs uboot rescue image to slugs gmenu/gmu image.  The initramfs was functional, but limited due to the high memory use of the filesystem in RAM.  This zipit seems to have less trouble with the SD cards, even though it has the exact same uboot image.  Weird.  Anyhow, aside from my general misgivings about uboot, this one looks quite promising.  However testing revealed a problem where some component of gmu (sdl, alsa, pthreads, nanosleep, or whatever) is causing it to use 70% of the CPU instead of the expected 17% or so.  I did a test build of rockbox for openwrt a while back which also performed poorly.  I wonder if it had the same problem...

Zipit 3.  I've been updating my gmenu/gmu image for the blob bootloader and the stock kernel.  It's not as pretty as slugs, but it's still fun to work on.  I'm currently fiddling with the wifi setup scripts in an effort to add options for multiple profiles.  I've also started poking through slugs gmenu2x updates to see how hard it would be to backport the wifi setup dialogs and other changes.  I've also done some work on running a 2nd tty so I can have gmu in the background and a clock on the screen, but running in another tty.  Both ttyclock and dgclock seem to function with gmu in the background.  However this required me to map the home key as F1 so I could enter the magic ctrl-alt-F1 sequence recognized by SDL programs to escape to tty1.  I created a t2 script to launch a new tty and a cls script to rotate the tty, turn on the cursor, and clear the screen, just in case it gets hosed somehow.  I also added a deallocvt utility to the lcdval mcb so I can clean up abandoned ttys.

Zipit 4.  I've been tinkering with the rockbox/glinks image that dronz whipped up.  I built a smaller partial static glinks for sdl and added latin1 keyboard support so now there's a little bit of room to grow.  Here it is with a totally fictional foreign URL. 

I also built a slightly smaller mpg123 in case I want to grow this jffs into something with internet radio support.  And I've been tinkering with the keymap because I really want to standardize on one sticky latin15 keymap and one non-stick keymap for all my IZ2S derivatives.  I still need to do something about the other Fn keys though.

Zipit 5.  This has my original jffs base image and plenty of free space for testing things while I attempt to shrink them down.  For example, I used this one to test a latin1 build of pspmaps.  I recycled the latin1 kbd routines from glinks and made pspmaps accept latin1 locations.  Then I discovered RFC 3986 which says you now need to convert URLs to utf-8 before percent encoding and assembling your http GET request.  So I finally got my foot in the door a utf-8 app (well half utf-8 anyhow).  My son just went overseas with his classmates so I offered the zipit, just in case he needed to use it for directions.  He took his ipod instead.  C'est la vie...

With the new pspmaps you can travel from Paris to Mâcon, without crossing the Atlantic to wind up in Macon, GA.

I also used htop on zipit 5 to do some baseline performance testing of gmu and mpg123 on IZ2S based systems.  Mpg123 seems to use about 13% to 18% of the CPU to play and gmu about 2% more.  While testing I discovered that I need a .bashrc file in the home directory on the jffs to set the terminfo path if I want to run curses programs like htop in an ssh session.  Gotta add that to the next revision of all the IZ2S based jffs systems.

Finally, I'm currently investigating toybox and it's oneit utility to see if it's more efficient than own-tty or this busybox sh trickery.  Toybox is a tiny busybox alternative with some interesting features for my jffs images.  It's fairly compact and comes with a nice set of utilities that complement the stock busybox without all the overhead of the full busybox replacement from IZ2S.  I could use it to replace nc, killall, tee, and a few other standalone programs that I've built and get quite a bit more for just a few K.  Since toybox comes with a mini bzcat, I figured I might as well look for mini versions of zip and gzip to round out the compression options.  I found some, but more testing is needed.

There will be goodies when I track down where I posted them on the #zipit IRC channel...

links-latin-sdl-iz2s.zip
Here's the source, finally:  lnks-sdl-iz2s-latin-src.tar.bz2
Here's a comprehensive patch for links-2.3 on the zipit:  links-2.3-zipit.patch

pspmaps-utf8latin-iz2s.zip
pspmaps-utf8latin-iz2s-src.zip

mpg123-iz2jffs.zip

Here's toybox, deallocvt, and related scripts for using multiple vts (as shown below).
toybox-iz2jffs.zip

Source for the new lcdval mcb with deallocvt:  ez2sutils-src.zip

For some reason I felt compelled to compile the lynx browser.  lynx-iz2s.zip

Where's the Beef?

The goodies you seek are here. and/or here.  Read on if you want to know why.

But first, a note about the goodies.  Much of it is intended for either iz2s or iz2jffs.  They're basically the same thing except iz2jffs is much smaller and resides on the internal   flash, whereas iz2s is installed on an SD card.  Both are hacked up systems that make use of the stock kernel that comes pre-installed on the zipit.  It's an ancient kernel, but I like it for my purposes.  Now since the entire thing is hacked together there's no real package management system for beginners.  Sorry about that.  You might just have to learn your way around the linux file system if you want to get a lot out of this.

Anyhow, if you want to use lots of this stuff, then your best bet is to  boot from an iz2s SD card.  Otherwise, if you know what you're doing, you can use all of the goodies with an iz2jffs setup, but it takes a little extra work to get it to recognize the libraries and paths used by the stuff.  The addz goodie pack does this for you for some of the older goodies that can't possibly fit on the jffs.  You'd have to do something similar to the addz pack to adapt the newer goodies to work with the jffs.  I may do it someday, but right now I'm booting from the SD card most of the time.

And now for the story of the goodie bag...

It's been said that the internet giveth and the internet taketh away.  And sometimes that's true.  It's also been said that the internet never forgets, but that's another story.  This one is about give and take.  Previously my cable provider of 10 years decided to eliminate their crappy (but free!) web hosting service because absolutely nobody was using it, except me.  So the Zipit Goodie Bag had to pack up and move.  Rkdavis graciously provided a new home for it, but it's fallen into a bit of disrepair lately.  I suspect he's taken in too much raspberry pi vapor, and will be back when the buzz wears off.

In the meantime I've been keeping things patched together by hosting new goodies at datafilehost.com.  But already some of the links have gone dead due to lack of interest.  Imagine that!  My 40MB IZ2S emacs package has gone missing due to lack of downloads.  Don't you people realize the awsome power of a fully operational emacs?  Even my own son has turned against me, recently declaring allegiance to vi instead of emacs.  I've seen this movie before and let me just say, it doesn't end well for the zipit.

But now Dronz has provided the Zipit Goodie Bag with a new summer home in France.  So it's time for some spring cleaning.  I'm planning to prune all the dead links in the blog and redirect them to this post, where I still have the editing power to keep things up to date.  From now on, this post will tell you to where all the goodies actually reside.

Here's the Zipit Goodie Bag Summer Home, including the new jffs goodies.
And here's the old tried and true (but in need of an update) Zipit Goodie Bag.

In the Zone

I decided to use my renewed focus on the jffs to try and see if I could squeeze gmenu2x onto the stock zipit jffs along with gmu. (I've already fielded a few not so subtle hints from my co-worker that the linux command line is perhaps not the easiest way to use the zipit.)  This wasn't gonna be easy though because gmenu2x is fairly bloated with C++, freetype, and lots of png files.

The first thing I did was to cut it back to a minimal installation with just the default skin, only one translation (french), and fewer icons and the smallest background image file I could find.  See above.  I also ran all the images through pngcrush for good measure.  This resulted in a gmenu2x installation that was almost small enough for the jffs.  Unfortunately it didn't quite work when run from the stock busybox shell.  I had to build a tiny killall executable to enable my previous uclibc workaround from the iz2s build.  Then I had to make sure to "exec gmenu2x" from my gmenu wrapper script or it would complain about various tty ailments whenever it finished running an app.  Weirdness.

Next I attempted to link gmenu2x without libstdc++ according to these instructions.   But gmenu2x uses STL strings, dynamic casts, and more from libstdc++ so the best I could do was skip exceptions and static link with libstdc++.a.  The shared lib is about 800k stripped, and would would use about 300K compressed on the jffs, so I managed to squeeze a little bit out of it.  I recently discovered the jffs seems to garbage collect on boot up, which means I may have a reliable way to compare the space usage.  So I'll probably try to install the full lib someday to see exactly how much I saved.  Actually, I suspect I'll hold off on that until I find another C++ program that I just gotta have...

I also tried static linking libfreetype, but that didn't save anything.  A stripped libfreetype is 400K, or about 200K compressed on the jffs, so I bit the bullet and stuck it on there.  This meant I could also toss in the dgclock program for only 20K if could trick it to use the same font as gmenu2x.  So I moved the /mnt/ffs/gmenu2x/skins/Default/font.ttf file to /mnt/share/fonts/font.ttf and replaced it in it's original location with a soft link.  Then I soft linked the mplus-2p-medium.ttf file used by dgclock to font.ttf and voila!  The dgclock works.  The gmenu2x font file is fairly compact but I can barely tell the difference in the dgclock program.  It might have slightly narrower glyphs.  Maybe it'll be good enough for a few more small SDL-ttf programs.

This fit onto the zipit, but just barely, so I swapped out the wpa-supplicant and wpa-passphrase for my cut down versions.  The ones from the V1 firmware (and IZ2S) are fairly large, and the ancient wpa-supplicant was having troubles connecting reliably to WPA2 routers anyhow.  The new smaller version actually seems to work better.  This got me to about 700K free on the jffs.  That's enough room for some more small goodies.

While working with dgclock, I noticed the zipit appeared to be stuck in a different timezone (somewhere in europe?) instead of EST5EDT.  I'm not sure what caused it, but eventually I deleted the /mnt/ffs/TZ file and rebooted.  The timezone setting script popped up.  I entered EST5EDT, and it recovered.  Then I realized I was off by an hour because the 2007 daylight savings rules weren't incorporated into the iz2s uclibc.  Fortunately Dom pointed out the uclib TimeZone fix for the US 2007 daylight savings change in one of the comments here.    Down at the bottom it mentions the magic EST5EDT,M3.2.0,M11.1.0 setting for the /mnt/ffs/TZ file.  EST5EDT,M3.2.0,M11.1.0 is US Eastern Time with Daylight Savings Time starting on the 3rd month (March), 2nd week, day 0 (Sunday) and continuing until the 11th month (November), 1st week, day 0 (Sunday).

Here's a combo jffs image containing the base, gmu and gmenu2x packages to make it an easier install for newbs.  Note:  I said "easier", not "easy".

gmu-gmenu2x-jffs.tgz   Here's the install instructions.

And apparently the Goodie Bag was offline for a while.  Sorry.  I think I'll try and mirror it...

Uncontrollable Urges

In the midst of all my utf8 sleuthing I got the urge to revisit my problem using bash (instead of the busybox shell) to type extended characters with the European keymap.  Running loadkeys eurokeymap.map says, "assuming iso-8859-15 euro".  Hmm, 8859...  I went back to Prototypeur, followed the french wikipedia link and finally realized my error...  Ah ha!  That's not utf8.  It's just a full 8bit codepage.  The french wikipedia page is actually clearer than the english version because the compact table layout makes it obvious at a glance that this is single byte encoding.  The english table is bloated and confusing with octal numbers and redundant hex values.  Who really cares about the octal these days?  Octal's about as useful as Roman numerals.  The future belongs to hex.

To make it work I want bash to run 8bit clean instead of 7bit only.  Maybe that'll help for for utf8 too.  Here's how.

Make a .inputrc file in the home directory and put this in it. Or try a global /etc/inputrc file.

# .inputrc controls how programs using the readline library behave.

# This includes bash.

### Make Bash 8bit clean ###

# Enable 8bit input

set meta-flag on

set input-meta on

# Turns off 8th bit stripping

set convert-meta off

# Keep the 8th bit for display

set output-meta on

As if that weren't enough, while all of this was going on I finally got around to packaging up the gmu music player for the jffs.  This came about because a co-worker suddenly decided he was ready for his zipit that I'd promised to deliver (as soon as it was done).  You know how that goes with software.  It's never really done...  Anyhow, I came up with 3 potential configurations for the jffs on this zipit:  rockbox for mp3s and games, gmu for mp3s and internet radio, or mplayer and some simple bash wrapper scripts like these for mp3s, internet radio, and possibly some video.   The gmu choice was selected so I finally put that together with all the required libs.  There's still about 1.2MB on the jffs for extra goodies, so I really need to identify some programs that make use of all those shared libs to get the most bang for the buck...

Meanwhile, in testing the gmu package, I discovered that my latest base jffs was horribly busted.  The timezone script was missing all the /dev/tty0 redirection that's required for scripts run before owntty in the boot sequence.  Oops, that little mistake left you hanging on a blank screen, waiting for you to select a timezone from an invisible list.  Not good.  Here's a replacement timezone script for the 2 people who downloaded the broken jffs base.

tz-iz2jffs.zip

Here's a gmu package suitable for the stock jffs.  I preloaded the playlist with a few stations.

gmu-0.8-iz2jffs.tar.bz2

Terminally Insane

This one is a long rambling mess.  Sorry in advance...

I found a simple program at the Linux Productivity Magazine to display the curses ACS special characters.  When I tried it I discovered that some looked wrong, and some were missing on the zipit.  All of the box drawing characters there but the arrows were garbled, the "lantern" or vertical tab char was missing, and all of the 1 3 5 7 9 single scan line glyphs were missing except for the ones that do double duty as the dash and the underline.

I took a peek at the unicode table from my console font and discovered the unicode mappings for the scan line glyphs were way up in the Chinese section of the giant unicode table.  So I moved them back down into the 0x2xxx range, rebuilt the font file and voila, the scan lines were there.  Turns out ACS_LANTERN was just missing from my mcurses code. The arrows were a different story.  They're not included in the 32 characters of the DEC special graphics set.  I need to print a unicode character in order to display them, so for now I went with the default standby ASCII substitutes of <>^v for the arrows and # for ACS_BOARD and ACS_BLOCK.

It drives me nuts that I've got all these nice glyphs in the font and yet have no way to display them.  So I went looking for some simple C code to print a unicode character.  This turns out to be all tangled up with a monster sized locale and nls system on my desktop linux box. 

There are about a dozen environment variables that control all sorts of settings.  So I tried setting these up for US english with UTF-8 according to the notes on the internet.  Not only did this have no effect, but when I try to set LC_CTYPE something (bash, I think) spits back an error message.  WTF?  It's just an environment variable!  Shut up and set it.  You might think its some sort of conspiracy to force a huge bloated locale database onto the zipit in /usr/lib/locale.  Ok, it's only 2.5M but that's too much for the jffs and I think the FAT filesystem of IZ2S will bloat that way up because it can't use soft or hard links to avoid duplication.  Plus I really don't need the zipit to know what order I want my socks sorted, or what time in the afternoon to serve me tea.  I just want to be able to print all of the characters I loaded into my font.  Is that too much to ask?

Well I did some soul searching, and some google searching and eventually unearthed the magic escape sequences to put the terminal into UTF-8 mode and back (ESC%G and ESC%@).  Armed with this knowledge I wrote a short C program to print the ACS_BLOCK character.  And it worked!

Well, it worked in my gnome term on the desktop linux, and it worked on the zipit linux console in both bash and the busybox ash shell.  But it didn't work in gnu screen or dvtm.  Fooey!.  Actually it turns out I can make it work in screen if I issue the ESC%G from a shell script first and then run "screen -U".  Ok.  I can live with that, but dvtm just eats the ESC% and spits out the G. (I can't remember, but I think this script may have finally let me type UTF-8 at the bash command prompt, instead of just in the busybox ash shell.)

Fortunately the dvtm code is pretty straightforward (unlike screen, which may have a secret built-in nethack mode?). I found the ESC handler code and added a little patch to eat the entire ESC%G sequence and toggle the internal is_utf8 flag.  But then dvtm just prints three nonsense characters for my 0xe2,0x86,0x88 sequence instead of converting to the proper unicode BLOCK glyph.  The man pages tell me mbrtowc and the reverse wcrtomb functions are under the influence of LC_CTYPE.  It's that darn conspiracy again! 

Back to the internet for a workaround.  This sorta spells out the problem and it gives a hint about the leader of the conspiracy: glibc.  I'd bet uclibc doesn't even know about those locale files.  Anyhow, I found some magic c code to convert utf8 to utf16 with no mention of the evil LC_CTYPE conspiracy.  It worked somewhat.  Debugging showed everything converted ok inside dvtm, but ncurses still eats the final result, no matter what form I try to push through.  Probably in league with the conspiracy.  So now what to do?

Maybe I should try to build a small ncurses example and get it working before moving back to dvtm. 

Or maybe I should do something about the nl_langinfo() function.  This function is used by both the dvtm vt.c init code and the ncurses ncurses/tinfo/lib_setup.c file to determine if the tty is in UTF-8 mode.  The nl_langinfo function is in the uClibc libc.so.0 library and I suspect it's just a stub, hardcoded to POSIX and C locales.  According to the uclibc FAQ you can compile in UTF-8 locales but that makes it significantly bigger, depending on the number of locales. (http://uclibc.org/FAQ.html)  The IZ2S libc is pretty small at just under 300K.  Plus you supposedly had to fetch uClibc-locale-030818.tgz manually to build the locale support, so I doubt it's in there.  Grep found the word POSIX, but no mention of UTF, LC, or LANG.  At least uClibc seems to be on my side, resisting the bloat, just not in a useful way that lets me use my font.

It looks like I could undefine HAVE_LANGINFO_CODESET and recompile ncurses so it uses an internal nc_get_locale() function instead.  But then I might have to undefine HAVE_LOCALE_H so nc_get_locale uses getenv instead of setlocal(LC_CTYPE, 0) which always returns "C" instead of "en_US.UTF-8" (or anything.UTF-8).  And what about the NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS environment variable hack?  I may need to set that once I'm in utf8 mode in ncurses.  There appear to be some special case hacks in the code to do this for gnu screen and when TERM=linux.

I ended up with a special version of nl_langinfo() that scans the environment vars for UTF-8.  I also bypassed setlocale() in the ncurses lib_setup.c file and now I see a UTF-8 locale.  But the meta and control conversions are taking precedence over the characters.  e2 94 a4 is printed as M-b ~T M-$.  And the block glyph e2 96 88 is printed as M-b ~V ~H.  Darn it!  Ncurses is a tough nut to crack!

Anyhow, dvtm is off the hook.  I can't even get a simple standalone ncursesw program to print utf8.  Worse, I can't even get the test programs that come with ncurses to print utf8!  I'm either building it wrong, or something in uclibc is broken.  Right now, I can't even tell if ncursesw is even using the wide char routines, though it is 20K larger than the non-wide ncurses.  Stupid speed optimization macros make it really hard to decypher the code.  Besides, it's more likely that some other fn like isprint or isascii from uclibc is steering ncurses the wrong way.  Apparently ncurses uses just about every single function that deals with text somewhere.  No wonder it's so fat.  And yes, it uses isprint() in multiple places, and the man page implies isprint() needs a working setlocale() to handle utf8.  However the uclibc implementation of isprint is a friggin ugly macro in ctype.h, so I can't easily replace it.  The macro doesn't look like it even considers utf-8.  That means multiple hacks will be needed in the obtuse ncurses code instead.  Ouch.

Meanwhile the ncurses source directory has a wcwidth.h file that looks suspiciously like the substitute wcwidth fn I dug up.  And there are tantalizing hints in the test directory that just maybe there's a configure option to use libutf8 instead of the libc defaults.  Is that just for the test programs?  Maybe I should try it.  Then if it works try it with my test program, and then dvtm if that works.  Unfortunately I think it's a hidden configure option.  configure --help=short gives no clue how to change it.

My list of hacks was getting sorta big, so I decided to try libutf8 to replace the whole pile of crap.  It's kinda big though at 160K, and the easier to use shared lib LD_PRELOAD plug version wouldn't link in my scratchbox toolchain.  So in the end, all I can say is that I'm still working on on it...

Someday when I get things together I'll post the updated fonts, and maybe an new dvtm-wide.

Remix

With the tiny mcurses build of ttyclock under my belt, I set my sights on some larger targets to mcursify.  First up was the alsamixer.  Even with the salsa rebuild it's still quite large due to the big fat lump of static ncurses embedded in the executable.  I added a few more stub functions to mcurses and made a new 60K (before upx) alsamixer for a savings of 100K.  Not bad, if only it worked.  Segfault!  Rather than wade through the voluminous verbiage of alsa goodness, searching for the offending mcurses function, I decided to look elsewhere for perhaps a smaller starter mixer.  Turns out there's not much out there and most of it predates ALSA, using the earlier OSS mixer controls. 

I like the simple compact look of rexima though.  So I built a 19K  mcurses version, hoping it might just work.  And it did.  Sorta.  It came up with only three controls displayed: PCM, PCM2, and IGAIN.  WTF?  I twiddled them anyhow.  PCM is what it says, the mostly useless master volume control.  PCM2 controled the headphone volume, and I think IGAIN handled the volume for weird zipit microphone input.  With no way to control the tiny zipit speaker, this wasn't gonna work.  Fortunately I went to the net and discovered these are just the default mappings from the emulated OSS mixer to ALSA mixer controls, and you can override them by writing the correct settings to /proc/asound/card0/oss_mixer in your boot up scripts.  On IZ2S and it's derivatives, that place would be at the end of the setup-alsa.sh script.  So I whipped up some changes and settled on the handful of controls I'm likely to use.  I also squeezed the rexima display down to zipit size, and added a splash of mcurses color.

Once I had the emulated OSS mixer under control I thought it might be fun to dig through the old curses music players.  Who knows what sort of nuggets might be in that pile.  I decided to try building the orpheus music player because it claimed make use of mpg123, which is included in IZ2S, and it mentioned internet radio support.  It's internationalized C++ so it's probably too bloated for the jffs.  Because of that I went with a regular ncurses build, after tweaking the screen layout and key bindings with the usual zipit fixes.  It looks ok, and it seems to work, but I don't think it's really what I want.  It did however prove that OSS mixer based programs can be viable on IZ2S.

That's orpheus up top working its way through a funky Eddie Hazel playlist, with rexima mixin it up down below in the bottom dxvt window.

Here's a 21K rexima executable with source (including mcurses) and a modified IZ2S setup-alsa.sh.  You can borrow the new oss settings from the bottom of the alsa script if you want to use this on the jffs.