upx, tinylogin

[Adi Linden]

Hi,

> I've continued some of my tests.  The results:
> - upx compressed executables don't seem to work on a 386, on a 
> Pentium, K6 and P-II they work correctly.  This may be a problem 
> for real embedded systems as the 386sx is still quite popular there.

I am booting the systems from a ramdisk which is compressed. A 2.7meg
filesystem compresses to about 970k on the boot media. Since I usually
have plenty of RAM I just load everything in a ramdisk. 

This works great for router type applications where there is no data that
changes over time that would have to be saved. 

> - I've started to experiment with tinylogin, a multicall binary like 
> busybox that replaces login, su, passwd, getty and some other 
> utilities.  It's really nice, but I have some problems with su and with 
> remote login as root.  I'll keep you posted.

I've build one system with it successful. But I haven't build a
PeeWeeLinux package yet. I am planning on building patchfiles for all
existing PeeWeeLinux packages. So there will be a script that compiles and
builds all the PeeWeeLinux packages from the `stock' sources and generic
patches.

> - I'm having a couple of problems with elvis : it seems to loose 
> track of the operations on a line (successions of a, i, x for 
> example), resulting in unwanted results.  Am I the only one having 
> this problem?  

I've noticed that elvis does not properly deal with the screen. I find
that if you memorize what you do it'll work ok. But certain operations
`loose' thew status line.

In a raouter project I used a static vi instead. It's big but more
reliable than elvis. I used to use ee. It uses a very different syntax but
worked great with termcap. 

> In the mean time : most of my tests were done on a K6-200 and a 
> 386dx25 (yesyes ;-)) with 8MB RAM.  Even the latter "feels" quite 
> OK and should be a usable platform for simple tasks or for tasks 
> were high performance is not an issue.

I've looked at 386's. But booting a ramdisk into 8MB ram doesn't leave
much for `real' memory!

TTYL,
Adi

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