Xvesa - minimal static uclibc version

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technosaurus
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Xvesa - minimal static uclibc version

#1 Post by technosaurus »

I wanted to have a fallback Xserver that worked regardless of any problems with system libs, so I compiled this static version against a μclibc toolchain
I used amigo's X11-tiny version here:
ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dist ... iny-1.2.61
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

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#2 Post by technosaurus »

I did one small patch to change the ugly background to plain black:

the patch is here

This one is a upx'd binary in a gzipped tarball (as /bin/Xvesa for easy inclusion in an initramfs)
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

amigo
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#3 Post by amigo »

Nice to see someone getting some use out of that! Dou you know about the history/origin of that?

The original work was done by 'monkie' for his 1diskx distro -that was a small distro with X on a single floppy! The creation of 1diskx was wrapped in mystery, but later someone (now defunct: modest-proposals.com) else created the Xwoaf (X windows on a floppy) distro and retraced monkies steps to create 1diskx and providing sources. He still left some of the process in the dark, though, by only describing the changes made to the Xlib code -leaving it to the reader to learn it (on a pretty steep curve). I found the way and de-mystified it by creating the fully-altered sources and automated build.

I also have there oxelmo, retawk and txplor sources which I was able to build against the tiny-X libs. xwoaf had also included some toher progs which I was unable to get to compile, at the time. Most of the work needed gcc-2.95 to be able to compile.

As I said, 1diskx was very 'murky'. It was a read-only system so you could never do any saves or add/remove programs. monkie had very ingeniously compiled the kernel, libs and executables into a single-binary. Since the kernel was a pre-2.6 version it could be booted directly without any bootloader and used an internal-offset to jump to the initrd which contained the rest of the system. There was a tiny bit of room left in the system so you could create a couple of small files, but they were lost on shutdown. Really great work -I hope he got a nice job out of promoting himself that way -it's not likely he did, though, as he was a royal PITA on his website...

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#4 Post by technosaurus »

You have some good stuff there amigo - I "discovered" desklaunch the other day and am thinking about hacking it into jwm. I didn't build those other apps because Xvesa didn't actually require it and imake was having issues - I think because of bad tr calls, so I just hacked up the makefiles with sed and geany.

I tested a few floppy distros a while back, but I have been primarily using a laptop for the last five years or so. I still do like the _idea_ of a single binary system, but maybe more like 3 separate main binaries: kernel + CLI=busybox + X=todo(see_vala/geany_thread for my template) ... and 1 multicall script too - in progress see my bashbox work.

The 2.6 kernel _can_ include the other files inside of it within an initramfs for the _appearance_ of a single file and doesn't need a bootloader if you have coreboot (formerly linux bios) So far the only distro I have seen use this method is xPUD - (he has some extremely innovative ideas).
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

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#5 Post by Ibidem »

technosaurus wrote:I tested a few floppy distros a while back, but I have been primarily using a laptop for the last five years or so. I still do like the _idea_ of a single binary system, but maybe more like 3 separate main binaries: kernel + CLI=busybox + X=todo(see_vala/geany_thread for my template) ... and 1 multicall script too - in progress see my bashbox work.

The 2.6 kernel _can_ include the other files inside of it within an initramfs for the _appearance_ of a single file and doesn't need a bootloader if you have coreboot (formerly linux bios) So far the only distro I have seen use this method is xPUD - (he has some extremely innovative ideas).
And Quirky, as I recall.
But a tiny X server does sound interesting...pts-tcc might be interesting to throw in there, too (a 1MB static C compiler that creates static binaries, linked against the included uclibc)

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mouse reverse patch (?)

#6 Post by goingnuts »

I have been trying to fix the reverse mouse scroll problem - might have found a solution:
Replacing the /programs/Xserver/hw/kdrive/linux content with the attached content before compile seems to fix it...
I am not able to compile the xvesa as "hard" as you but also attached the possible fixed version (632Kb)...if anyone should want to test.
Update 230911: Removed the Xvesa build as it turned out to be unstable. Also removed the patched directory, a more simple patch for the mouse scroll further down this thread.
Last edited by goingnuts on Fri 23 Sep 2011, 17:32, edited 1 time in total.

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#7 Post by technosaurus »

I have a project on the backburner to sanitize xvesa as a standalone package with just a build script (no make files or weird config files)
not sure whether to go with amigo's tiny X, the latest Xfree86, or some version of Xorg before it was removed

is this patch from one of those versions?

it would be a lot easier if it had a comment or two and its a PITA to navigate ... almost as bad as the mozilla source, but with out all the Ghost Busters references
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

goingnuts
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#8 Post by goingnuts »

Found a tc xvesa-build script by searching for "mouse.patch xvesa" - and used that with the tinyXlib. Used ulibc build root - but it also compiles with older ulibc. I have considered trying to apply the tinyxlib to the tc version. I fully agree that the source and build script is kind of messy and a clean up/simplification + include all needed stuff to the source would be nice. I haven't been able to use the tinyXlib to compile other X-progs yet - that was my original purpose for messing with tinyXlib. BTW the mungdev project compiles a static vesa using tinyxlib+ulibc that is below 400Kb - but havent been able to get it running in Puppy...
Update 050911: Might be that the above patch makes display freeze - not sure though. A minor patch that seems to fix the revers scroll problem (only) attached.
Attachments
mousescrollpatch.tar.gz
(623 Bytes) Downloaded 811 times

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