State of the Zipit

The Zipit Z2 has been around for a while now and is showing some age compared to the newest flashy ARM devices like the beagleboard and the soon to be released Raspberry Pi, but there's still plenty of life left in the Z2. You can now get a Z2 for as low as $10. In December 2010 rkdavis did a little blurb about what went on that year in the land of the Zipits. This is my blurb for what happened in 2011.

Early on in 2011, fanoush brought us a properly rotated uboot screen on the Zipit lcd as well as a more reliable uboot keypad driver. To go along with these changes I released a new flash that included fanoush's uboot patches and a "RecoveryOS" which contained a small/basic linux initramfs with some tools that (barely) fit into the Zipit's flash memory.

I modified the z2uflasher script to work from iz2s/ez2s, then rkdavis came out with Flashstock that allows flashing a stock Zipit directly to uboot all in a single zip file, bypassing the need for the old 2.6.29 linux kernel/autoflasher.

wicknix released z2lite, a lightweight builtroot based distro with bunch of fun stuff (emulators, audio players, etc).

anarsoul was hard at work last year on patches to the mailine kernel for the Zipit. He's gone from v2.6.3x all the way to the current v3.2 mailine kernel. He also released some recipes for the NetSurf browser, sources for an updated mouse emulator and Zipit patches for qemu.

Projectgus pulled off a new Zipit distro: OpenWrt. It's linux intended for routers, but since it's so lightweight it makes a good fit for the Zipit. So lightweight in fact that I was able to fit it into the Zipit's internal flash.

Deeice has been feverishly cramming as many apps as he can into his new iz2jffs.

I finally got my mitts on a wiggler clone jtag tool which allowed me to restore some of my previously bricked Zipits. In addition to bringing life back to some Z2's, this has helped test some new uboot patches (find "zipit" or "pxa27x" at that link).

As you can see the Zipit Z2 is still alive and well and things are already picking up in #zipit on irc this year. I plan to work on getting some more OpenWrt packages released and there may be a new uboot release soon (pending patch approvals). Let me know if I've missed anything important.

Happy (belated) New Year, Zipits!