tinysh - tiny limited onscreen shell

[kaminkatze]

Originally Posted by PoP

I use a similar !/mnt/us/bin/tinysh & launchpad shortcut and I simply enter the exit command in tinysh to exit from the shell. I didn't need to modify the script. Does the kite launcher act differently?

If I start tinysh via kite exit terminates only the evaluation part but the input loop keeps adding chars to the CMD variable and updates the command line.

[geekmaster]

By the way, I now have text output using a "dd" to "blit" characters onto the eink screen from a small PNG picture that contains all the ascii characters. It is more than twice as fast as watching uncompressed text come in from a BBS using a 300bps acoustic modem.

And with my smallest tiny font, I get 114 lines of 150 characters, all quite readable if you are near-sighed AND you wear magnifying glasses. I do not know what to call this yet, but I remember the idomatic expression "If you don't stop doing that, you'll go blind!", and may have the same effect, so I need a humorous name for what that warning was originally intended for. It only works on 8bpp displays now (k4 and touch), but it will not be too difficult to port to the k3 if I make sure all characters are multiples of 2px wide (including the whitespace between them). Tiny fonts are a lot faster than larger ones, so I was thinking of using it ONLY to display characters missing from eips. That way all the NORMAL characters would be fast, and only the "special" characters would be slow. I suppose I should post a demo of my tiny texter script... Yes?

I know -- because watching the tiny text print at "teletype speed" (but 3x faster), I will call it "titty - tiny teletype"... Is that too offensive?

[PoP]

Originally Posted by kaminkatze

If I start tinysh via kite exit terminates only the evaluation part but the input loop keeps adding chars to the CMD variable and updates the command line.

Ah. Thanks for clarifying.

Kite looks useful and I was tempted to install it but never did, fearing it a little when I saw its embedded binary (with no source that I could understand)... maybe fbdev can comment on the ssh/launchpad/kite different behaviours

[PoP]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

... I suppose I should post a demo of my tiny texter script... Yes?

Absolutely, learning bin/sh that way has never been more fun.

Originally Posted by geekmaster

I know -- because watching the tiny text print at "teletype speed" (but 3x faster), I will call it "titty - tiny teletype"... Is that too offensive?

Not that I am offended, but in the spirit of "hello world" style demos, you could also call it Kittty for Kindle Tiny TTY.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by PoP

Absolutely, learning bin/sh that way has never been more fun.



Not that I am offended, but in the spirit of "hello world" style demos, you could also call it Kittty for Kindle Tiny TTY.

Too late, I already posted it. This is a good addition to the tiny terminal script (to display characters not printable by eips), but will need a little tweaking for the k3, and a bigger font:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho....php?p=2026074

Actually it is a script, so "Script Kittty" would work, as a play on words for the pejorative "Script Kiddie".

Anyway, check out just how small it is...

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by PoP

Ah. Thanks for clarifying.

Kite looks useful and I was tempted to install it but never did, fearing it a little when I saw its embedded binary (with no source that I could understand)... maybe fbdev can comment on the ssh/launchpad/kite different behaviours

Exactly my thoughts regarding kite. Although C, the source code preprocessing made it essentually an undocumented foreign language that I did not have time to learn, so I never installed it. It DOES look quite fascinating though...

[thatworkshop]

Sometimes curiosity throws you into troubles... I just ran this script on my Touch and... tada... it bricked (I know, I know, it was stupid idea! )

I debricked it and the good thing is that I got it exactly back to the previous state (even my collections, hacks, etc.) with this. (I always keep a backup image inside my KT)

Moral of story: Do not try this script on Touch as of now (April 9th, 2012).

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by cscat

Sometimes curiosity throws you into troubles... I just ran this script on my Touch and... tada... it bricked (I know, I know, it was stupid idea! )

I debricked it and the good thing is that I got it exactly back to the previous state (even my collections, hacks, etc.) with this. (I always keep a backup image inside my KT)

Moral of story: Do not try this script on Touch as of now (April 9th, 2012).

This tinysh script does not do anything that CAN brick your device.

Your "debricking" procedure was just a complicated way of restarting your kindle. When in doubt, restart first...

You could have restarted by holding the power button for 20 seconds to do a hard restart.

When you ran this K3 script on your Touch, it paused the framework to prevent the K3 keyboard from opening a framework search bar, and it was waiting for you to type a command on the K3 keyboard. It *does* say in the first paragraph "only for the K3", and it says that if the keyboard keys are not responding to keypresses, slide the power switch to "wake" the kindle and enable the keyboard.

Because the framework was paused, the screen contents would not change by pressing the Home or Power buttons until the framework is resumed (or the kindle restarted). You could have resumed the framework from SSH (see the "killall -CONT ..." command in the script). You could have done a reboot command from SSH. You could have restarted by holding the power button for 20 seconds.

The backup copy you installed was probably identical to what was already there (unless you installed something that changed it since the backup). Reinstalling it did not do any harm, and at least forced you to restart your kindle to restart the framework (cvm and Xorg).

SUGGESTION: If you want to play with this script on a touch, you can change the defined key codes to the "keys" that the touch supports. I suggest commenting out the "killall" lines first until you have a good way to exit. The touch generates "keypress" codes for screen touches (one and two fingers) and for orientation (rotation) events. You can find the touch keycodes from SSH with:

while:;do waitforkey;done

Of course, this script will be a LOT more useful when it has onscreen keyboard support.

UPDATE: To prevent these problems in the future, for any script that pauses the framework I will add a "trap" command to resume the framework on script termination, and I will add "exit" key detection for all kindle models. For the touch, that could be "put two fingers on the screen and press Home button" (i.e. "3-finger salute", like ctrl-alt-del). Although that makes the scripts larger, it should eliminate any chance of confusion. I have tested working script code that does these things now, and it works quite well.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by cscat

Wish you were my teacher when I grow up and learned to program. Like really... No "thank you" can be enough for your efforts.

And by the way, I didn't want to deviate that thread of yours from main topic by saying this: I admit I panicked but hard resetting was not helpful as I tried it then. Oh and when the screen froze, yes I had SSH for a while but after some moments KT restarted and I had no way of having SSH. So yes, I could do something before it rebooted but not after that. Therefore, I still think you are right.

That is really strange. If you look at the script code, you will see that it does not write to anything except the visible portion of the framebuffer device. The only possible causes for your symptoms that I can see that would make your kindle not work after a hard restart would be SOMETHING ELSE that made changes to your /dev/mmcblk0p1, or perhaps your battery needed to be recharged.

This script (temporarily) pauses (killall -stop) both cvm and Xorg, but if you exit normally (type "exit" on K3 keyboard), it resumes (killall -cont) both of them. They would automatically restart if you restarted your kindle.

There have been no reported bugs in any external programs called by this script (eips, hexdump, dd, waitforkey). On the touch, waitforkey returns keycodes for Home, 1-finger touch, 2-finger touch, left/right/up/down rotations, and headphone-jack insert and removal. The rotation "keys" only return "pressed" status, but the other events also return "released" status. This script normally waits for keypresses in the "waitforkey" program.

Even picking up the kindle is likely to return a "rotate-up" keycode, but none of the touch keycodes are processed so it would just go back and wait for another key. Silently sucking up all the keypress events like this would LOOK like it is bricked, but again, restarting would put everything back to normal (unless SOMETHING ELSE bricked it).

To Do: I am now gathering all my script code snippets into one program that supports all the OLD functionality (including graphical arts demos), plus new features, including onscreen keyboards and other GUI elements (radio buttons, check boxes, sliders, etc.). Then AFTER it all works as a script, I will go through a process of translating it all to C in successive-refinement "baby steps".

The point of starting with scripts is 3-fold:
1) Teach shell scripting (teaching is the best way to learn).
2) Develop kindle-specific code with the most efficient algorithms (required for scripts).
3) Create kindle debricking tools with minimal external dependencies (but good fo general use too).

P.S. One of my K4NTs has a non-functional diags now. The menu comes up as an all-black screen. All I did was testing a fix for somebody where I just did a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0p3" in a RUNME.sh script. It still boots main, so the startup scripts DID rebuild it. At some point, I will try flashing a diags kernel and partition. This is part of the reason I wrote the "getkernels" script. These devices seem to be rather touchy and unpredictable at times.

I think that if your touch really DID brick, it was probably a firmware or startup script bug triggered by an unclean shutdown. But we will not know for sure unless we can predictably duplicate your symptoms, and I do not have time to try that. At least you did not lose your content, and that is a good thing...

[drauger]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

I plan to support anything with a 5-way pad too (including the K4).

Do you have any progress in developing tinysh? I was able to add EXIT command for my K4, but keyboard support looks too complicated for me, at least for the time being.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by drauger

Do you have any progress in developing tinysh? I was able to add EXIT command for my K4, but keyboard support looks too complicated for me, at least for the time being.

I have keyboard support working pretty well in /bin/sh code, but it is rather complex, so I was not ready to publish it.

I am working in C at the moment, which is a lot easier with the tcc package I put together.

I plan to implement the onscreen keyboard in C. I just finished a complete redesign of my eink display routines that work on all eink kindles (in C), and now the K4 main boot is correct (not a negative image), and the code is much faster now.

Anyway, there is only so much time, and so many different things that compete for my attention.

[drauger]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

Anyway, there is only so much time, and so many different things that compete for my attention.

Well, consider the fact that K4 still doesn't have any working terminal realization. Maybe, your tinysh could attract more developers and testers with K4?

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by drauger

Well, consider the fact that K4 still doesn't have any working terminal realization. Maybe, your tinysh could attract more developers and testers with K4?

For the K4 I want to do a "chording keyboard". I have done preliminary tests that show that this will work very well.

I have SO MANY things I want to finish (raw proof-of-concept code not ready for release), and so little time. My "to do" list gets shuffled depending on whatever recently grabbed my attention.

[drauger]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

For the K4 I want to do a "chording keyboard".

As far as I understand, K4 (and K5) onscreen keyboard cannot be used in tinysh because it stops framework. If we keep framework working, would it be possible to enter text from that keyboard?

[aditya3098]

Originally Posted by drauger

As far as I understand, K4 (and K5) onscreen keyboard cannot be used in tinysh because it stops framework. If we keep framework working, would it be possible to enter text from that keyboard?

I would NOT want to use the builtin one. Just imagine ^C' ing

wget http://some.com/kindle-doom-download