Great additon, thank you for bringing my favorite apps to the Kindle!
It works great, but for my taste, it's a bit too big. It's 500 MB, but only a bit more than 50 are actually used. So how about creating a smaller version with the same contents?
I actually did that, reducing the image to 75 MB. That's still about 20 MB of margin in case anything extensively writes there (I doubt it), but at least it hogs less of the precious user storage.
Here's what I did (as root on my Linux PC, and in a temporary directory already containing optware.img)
Code:
mkdir {big,small}
mount -o loop optware.img big/
dd if=/dev/zero of=small.img bs=1024 count=76800
losetup /dev/loop1 small.img
mkfs.ext3 /dev/loop1
tune2fs -c -1 /dev/loop1
tune2fs -i -1 /dev/loop1
tune2fs -L optware-extend /dev/loop1
mount /dev/loop1 small/
rm -rf small/lost+found/
rsync -av big/ small/
umount big/
umount small/
losetup -d /dev/loop1
The resulting file (small.img) works as a drop-in replacement for optware.img, except that it's much smaller.
Hope this is useful somehow - maybe you can package and make available this variant as well?