termcap

[Adi Linden]

Hi,

> I've just managed to get 0.19 running off a harddisk ;-)  

Good stuff!

> A couple of observations I'd like to discuss:
> - the /etc/termcap is really huge, I think that most people only need 
> some basic terminal support (eg vt100 and the Linux console - this 
> is an embedded system).  That reduces the file to hardly some kB, 
> and shrinks the image by some 400kB.

There is a small termcap included in the minimal.tar package. However, I
found that the terminal descriptions in it are too minimal for a system
administered via telnet from a variety of systems.

> - have you considered using upx on the executables?  It shrinks 
> e.g. the busybox in the distribution file to 43566 bytes, and the 
> elvis to 43278

What is upx???

> All this space could be used to either make the system's footprint 
> even smaller than it is right now, or to accomodate ncurses ;-)

I tried ncurses but found it much harder to shrink in size then termcap.
One of the future plans for PeeWeeLinux is to include means to create all
the packages from the sources by using patch files. Perhaps at that point
it might be an idea to give a choice of compiling with termcap or ncurses?
Still got to checkout this upx thing, though...

Great to hear from someone who's successful in running a PeeWeeLinux
system :)

TTYL,
Adi

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