Hi, like me use UCLX Compressor...
Example fron the site :
opera executable (the one in the sharp rom) orig.size --> 2.892.256 bytes
compressed with UCLX (level 10) --> 1.055.653 bytes (36.5 % of orig.size)
I use it for all my programs (Portabase, FreeNoteQT, etc.) even for "Fast load" programs
A "must have" in the new light ROM
Rearding UCLX Compressor - if you guys have paid a bit more attention you'd notice that is has been already used in Cacko 1.2x ROMs Opera, Netfront, QtMail (just to name a few) - these apps are already compressed using UCLX.
There are a few side affects though:
- space in /tmp is used when UCLX compressed is launched, and /tmp is limited to 10 Mb in current Cacko ROM versions
- application launch time is significaly longer - about 2 times for Opera.
- all applicationes are running under strange process (named "3" or similar) instead of their executable names
- the current directory for the application is /tmp, which may have negative affects - for eample Opera is looking for its plugins in /tmp/Opera/plugins folder...
BTW, my tests show that sqashfs compression is almost as good as UCLX, while providing for much better performance. This means that having application pre-built in ROM is more efficient in terms of storage and performance than having them compressed using UCLX and then installed. But like I said before, there will have to be trade offs between efficiency and flexibility.
Could I suggest that if you do consider UCLX Compressor that you put the decompression area on a RAM partition... UCLX decompresses writing the object to the /tmp directory then discards it when you have finished executing it.
On a flash based /tmp directory you end up with a lot of unnecessary writes wearing out your flash.
In Cacko ROMs /tmp is not in flash. It's not RAM either. It uses a special tmpfs file system, which doesn't consume any space untill actual data is written to it.