(2024-01-08) Minimalism strikes again: Kindle, Alpine and TUI-first mindset
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So much happened throughout the week that I really had to reimagine what to
write today. I wanted to just talk about the Amazon Kindle Basic 11th Gen
the company I work for gave to me as a Christmas gift and some internal
activity related award, but this just wouldn't cut it. Yes, this is among
the first MediaTek-based Kindles: while all previous generations were on
Freescales or something like that, this one runs on MT8110 (so-called
"Bellatrix" board). Yes, I rooted it with LanguageBreak ([1]), freezing the
firmware version at 5.15, installed KUAL, KOreader, Kterm ([2]) and
kual-linuxdeploy-armhf, but then the question "what next?" bothered me for
quite a while. I experimented with Xephyr-based XFCE installation and tried
to get something else in there, but then I just settled on an Alpine-based
chroot running in the same Kterm. Overall, the main firmware being just a
custom Linux (with X server and everything) and not Android, I see the
potential of turning this e-reader into a full-fledged hacker tablet, but
now even this chroot environment will do.
Alpine Linux, by the way, has been my distro of choice everywhere except the
main nettop where I still run Arch/Garuda. I had been running it on an old
2010 Macbook Air (A1370) as well, and even prepared a nice set of scripts
and CWM configuration specifically for it. However I foolishly believed that
I'd manage to find something even more minimal. Haiku and OpenBSD have
troubles with the Macbook's Broadcom B43 series WLAN chip. Void Linux is
just plain glitchy on that hardware for no apparent reason. This is how I
came to installing CRUX 3.7 on that very laptop.
A grave mistake.
For the first couple of days, I honestly thought I would get a usable and
rock-solid system if I would endure this long process of compiling
everything starting from the kernel and then whatever prt-get sysup command
was pulling in. On a 2-core 2GB laptop from 2010, uh-huh. On the third day,
while waiting for Rust (!) to compile, I managed to break what seemed
impossible to break and I believe couldn't be broken on any other system:
GCC. Namely, header files that I must have overwritten with a parallel scc
installation. Or cproc, or chibicc, I don't remember exactly. As a matter of
fact, some headers were gone. And guess what: restoring from the initial GCC
package DIDN'T FIX THEM. I surely must have missed something, but at this
point I had enough and went back to Alpine. By the way, I spent more time
copying the 3.19-extended ISO contents to the flash drive than actually
clean-installing it with its wonderful setup-alpine script.
By the way, Alpine is not so obvious to install from a USB flash drive, at
least on this Macbook A1370, unless you know a simple trick, because just
dd-ing the ISO image won't work. And, by the way, no one is preventing you
from using the same trick on all other x86-64 machines. First, format your
flash drive with a GPT partition table (that's a requirement) and a single
FAT32/vfat partition. Then, just extract the Alpine ISO contents into the
root of that partition. That's it. You now have a flash drive that's both
usable as a "normal" flash drive and bootable into an Alpine
live/installation system image on any (U)EFI-enabled machine, including such
Macbooks (which should detect it when booting with the Option/Alt key
pressed down).
Once you created this flash drive though, everything else is a breeze. For
x86 and x86_64, I recommend using the "extended" Alpine images because they
already contain all the firmware you might need to get connected. And again,
with this method, you totally may continue using the flash drive normally
for other storage purposes, just don't touch the boot, efi and apks
directories, and also probably the .alpine-release file in its root. This is
as human-oriented as it can possibly get for such a minimalist distribution.
As for the brief moment of using CRUX, I have to give it one credit though:
it really forced me to review my perception of minimalism even more. Having
to waste time to compile a lot of things that we take for granted in other
distros made me wonder whether or not we could get away without using those
things. Unfortunately, this includes the compilers themselves. Again, I'm
all for deploying cproc/chibicc/scc in any environment I can, but a lot of
software nowadays really depends on monstrous GCC/Clang-based toolchains
(and yes, zig cc belongs to the same category as a Clang derivative). And
yes, Nim doesn't help the situation as it uses the same monstrous toolchains
as the middleware. This is why, for my personal projects, I'm also thinking
about exploring some simpler options like (again, qbe-based) Myrddin ([3])
but I'm not really sure yet how independent it really is.
Another important topic that CRUX has directed my thoughts to and that I
really am looking forward to recreate in Alpine (instead of the cozy
Xorg+CWM) is purely TUI experience. Maybe even with framebuffer enabled,
because why not? E.g. fbterm looks fantastic when pointed to the Fira Code
Retina font. But I also have learned to generate pure-console keyboard
layouts, learned about some more TUI and framebuffer-aware software and so
on. Probably some of my next posts will be about the details of what I have
done on my newly-reinstalled Alpine and how exactly I have configured
everything there.
Moral of the story: 1) Amazon sucks as always, 2) true minimalism is not what
it seems, 3) the more you use CRUX, the more you appreciate Alpine.
--- Luxferre ---
[1]:
https://github.com/notmarek/LanguageBreak
[2]:
https://www.fabiszewski.net/kindle-terminal/
[3]:
https://myrlang.org/
