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.

Update: It's come to my attention that Windows will not see a Fat partition on a card if the first partition is ext2. I have changed the instructions below to so that the fat partition is first on the card, thus allowing you to use it with Windows.

I've been playing around with the OpenWrt RecoveryOS a bit recently. I like it because it's small, fast and there's a good amount of packages available in Projectgus' repo. The problem with all these awesome packages and the RecoveryOS, though, is that there's not much space left in the Zipit's internal flash to store these goodies. 

UPDATE: There seems to be a problem with the conservative cpu speed governor causing freezing of the Zipit. This is the default governor I have set in OpenWRT so you should change this to something else like "userspace" in /etc/init.d/z2-cpuspeed.

Projectgus released his port of OpenWrt for the Zipit recently and I've been working to get it into the flash on the Zipit. OpenWrt is pretty small on it's own so it wasn't too difficult to get it to fit in the measly amount of flash memory available.

There was a minor hurdle to overcome. The current mainline Linux kernel's partition setup is

mtdblock0 - u-boot
mtdblock1 - u-boot environment
mtdblock2 - Flash
mtdblock3 - u-boot splash

For some time now the EWoC script has been unable to accept SSID's with spaces in them. I have a modified version which allows for spaces.

ewoc-z2sid.fixed

I compiled the Linux 3.0.0+ kernel with some USB Wifi drivers. This should allow for some interesting things on the Zipit (hostap, wifi bridging, monitor mode, etc). Here's a list of the chipsets:

Broadcom 43xx (+legacy)
Atheros Based
Ralink rt2500, rt2501/rt73, rt27xx/rt28xx/rt30xx, rt2800usb
Realtek RTL8192CU/RTL8188CU
ZyDAS ZD1211/ZD1211B

You'll also need firmware for some of these. If you're using z2sid you can install them from the repos with apt-get. Here's a list of the Debian packages:
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=firmware&searchon=names&suite=unstable&section=all

I only tested with an Ralink rt73 stick and the Debian Sid firmware-ralink package. Have fun!

UPDATE: I packed up my current rootfs for anyone who would like to test it. If anyone has suggestions please post some comments. I'm really looking for a good panel type app that is light, has a menu and can display stats (cpu/batt/wifi). Autologin is setup for the username "user" with the password "user". Root has the password "root".

z2sidX_v7_rc1.tar.bz2 (mirror) Jul-7-2011 (md5sum 826d74c7a37a3d747a7a08aa1500a8da)

Wicknix has done it again with a light OS for the Zipit Z2, dubbed z2lite. There's a lot of goodies packed into this small OS. I just started trying out rc8 last week and it's quite nice. He's even compiled the links browser with graphical output so you can view webpages with pictures. Here's a few tweaks I've made so far:

Backlight Daemon:
Controls lcd and keyboard backlights. Changes from bright to dim and back when uplugged or plugged in. Also turns off backlights when lid is closed and back on when you reopen it. This is a combination of Russell Davis'/dtal's code. Download bl-uclibc to /usr/local/sbin/bl-uclibc and make it executable. then, add the following to /etc/rc.local:
#Start backlight daemon
/usr/local/sbin/bl-uclibc >/dev/tty1 &

Keymap: