Don’t Panic! The REAL HitchHikers Guide is here TODAY
As it turns out, with a little bit of effort you can put together a cheap (50$), handheld, wireless, graphical wikipedia browser ala the HitchHiker's Guide.
Prerequisites:
Install Linux (wifi), Xfbdev (x11) and Dillo (browser) on your Zipit Z2 as described here.
DilloRC:
Here's the custom part. After launching dillo for the first time, you'll have a ~/dillo/dillorc file in your home directory. Open that up, and customize the layout to your liking. Personally, I just enable "fullscreen mode" at startup and it hides all the buttons. Then head on down to the "search url" and enter in:
"http://google.com/search?btnI=1&q=en.wikipedia.org +%s"
This tells dillo to use google's "I'm feeling lucky" search on wikipedia for the search term. This allows for instant wikipedia browsing over wireless ala the hitchhiker's guide. All for under 50$ nice!
January 30th, 2009 - 14:40
Lovely. Great site.
March 20th, 2009 - 09:45
I like your idea.
I went a little overboard after I saw this.
I a 8G SDHC card is big enough to load the entire text of wikipedia and used the http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/buildWikipediaOffline.html offline wikipedia setup.
So not only can you have wikipedia access but you can have a wikipedia server for those occasions when wifi is not availible.
Now I just need a good “DON’T PANIC” desktop background…
It works but is quite slow, I need to see about using a better web server.
March 20th, 2009 - 09:56
Nice! The thing with the zipit is it has a 50/50 chance of reading large SD cards like that, so I’d try out a couple and make sure they boot ok before copying all the files over.
April 7th, 2009 - 12:11
what version of dillo did you compile? did it have ssl support?
April 7th, 2009 - 12:17
Hi,
Yes ssl support is compiled in. I have yet to use it on a site with login however, as there is no mouse support and hence the ctrl-s search workaround. I just used the version of dillo that was in the december angstrom repository. It doesn’t have a lot of dependencies, and compiled fine once I had gotten xbfdev (x11) to compile.
April 7th, 2009 - 17:21
Awesome! I’m setting up a debian box to do some oe compiling. I figure it will take about two days to compile all that.
Did you compile the console version and add the x package or build the full x image? Thanks for all your input!
April 7th, 2009 - 17:52
I started with a base image I bitbaked, then installed the xfbdev packages. I prefer to build up from the base distribution as the gpe and opie targets have their own set of issues. I have a local repository on an ubuntu box that’s about 300 gigs (and rising) from a bitbake world thats been running for many weeks. I’d stop it, but at this point I’m wondering how big it can get.
April 7th, 2009 - 18:26
Well, this machine is a poor old 700mhz AMD, so it’ll probably take me that long to compile the base image! I tried and failed to get OE running on OpenBSD, which was the only non MS platform I have at home.
June 7th, 2009 - 14:36
Mister Davis, this is highly interesting.
Are you still currently working on stuff for the zipit z2?
I’ve been interested in linux development for awhile now and I finally put linux (openSUSE JAcklab distro if you’re curious) on my machine to start working on getting the bearings.
I’ve wanted a handheld device to work on and I think one of these might be an ohkay place to start with considering their like thirty bucks now if you know where to look. (if I should brick it, no big loss)
The thing that somewhat stumps me a bit is the fact that I’ve only been able to find so many open projects on the device. Where is the scene? Has everyone just got bored and moved on? Perhaps everyones just waiting for Pandora..
Ah well. I agree even just a quick emu port running at 10 fps might revitalize peoples interest a bit. I personally am hoping to get some PIM apps ported from a similar system.. perhaps a sharp Zaurus, if I could just remove the touchscreen input and make it keyboard responsive.. any ideas on that?
June 8th, 2009 - 12:04
Hi Frankie,
YES! I have gotten back into the Z2 scene in a big way these past couple of weeks. Currently the activity has shifted to getting a new kernel (with working sound, etc) mainlined and set up based on work that sweetlilmre1 did on his website and sourceforge.
The current method is to flash the z2 kernel using this software on an SD card:
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/openzipit/index.php?title=AutoFlasher_Software
In general, the newest info is availabe at the sourceforge project:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openzipit
And at his blog at:
http://sweetlilmre.blogspot.com/
I’ll personally be re-flashing my zipit this evening via this new method. From there I’ll hopefully be re-porting dosbox from the arm port (thanks exophase) and pushing patches up to the new sourceforge tree.
As always the zipit yahoo group is kind of active, but
June 8th, 2009 - 16:30
Sweet, thanks for the input, is the new kernel using a modified z2 native kernel or an open embedded kernel?
The site didn’t really go into it. I noticed it says userlands are availabe now.. I promptly did a little dance of glee. *ahem*
Thanks for the new links, thats gonna be a big help when my zipit comes in. I was going to linux.zipitwireless.com which is rather out of date, all the forum entries are from 6 months back or more.
I’ll be keeping an eye on your site to see what other awesome things you come up with!
Thanks again!
June 9th, 2009 - 11:56
NP, it’s using an OE kernel. Hopefully I’ll get around to flashing it tonight
June 16th, 2009 - 18:47
This post and the one on running Dosbox on the Zipit 2 have really given me the motivation to start playing around with the Zipit 2 again.I recently went and got OE running on my computer with Sweetlilmre’s repository, but I’ve been having an issue with the builds. I tried to post on the Zipit yahoogroup forum instead of bugging you personally, but it states that my post needs to be verified first, and that may take a while. I was hoping you could shed some light on my issue.
When I’ve been bitbaking the images, they build without issues but they fail to boot on an SD card. It hangs at the point it says “Taking root…” (left it for about 20 minutes with no change) while using a known working base-image tarball works. Also, while using the known working image, when I try to install packages it gives errors about being unable to find the packages. This occurs even if I specify the full path and filename. From what I could tell from searching online, this can happen when trying to use packages built for the wrong architecture, but my zipit2.conf sets TARGET_ARCH=”arm” so I don’t know where to go from there.
Am I doing something wrong that would cause this? How did you set up your OE toolchain? I’ve worked my way around the other issues I had, but this has left me stumped. I’m still very inexperienced using OE, so I very well may be missing something really simple.
June 16th, 2009 - 19:09
Hey Karl,
Yeah this happened to me too. It’s because the new sweetmre kernel is designed to be flashed directly onto the Z2 with the z2flasher.sh that’s on the sourceforge site. I’ve been meaning to do that very thing, but have a family visit this past week. Hopefully this weekend I’ll post about the experience. Glad to hear that things are picking back up in the Z2 circle. I think a lot of people agree a nice working image with some emulators running may entice people back
good luck,
/H
June 16th, 2009 - 19:34
Ahhh, that would do it. I guess I was missing something simple after all, lesson learned- always re-read the directions, something may have changed since last time XD. Time to order a backup and get to work. Thanks a ton Hunter!
-Karl
June 26th, 2009 - 19:48
Any chance you can post your xorg.conf? i’m having a pig of a time with getting X installed and working on the zipit
thnx
June 26th, 2009 - 23:09
Sure Here’s what I’ve been using so far
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "fbdev"
Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb0"
VendorName "Unknown"
BoardName "Unknown"
Option "Rotate" "CCW"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
SubSection "Display"
Modes "240x320"
EndSubSection
EndSection
June 27th, 2009 - 09:16
thanks alot. i’ll give it a go. maybe then i can use pidgin rather than finch for my iming
June 27th, 2009 - 23:22
Good luck. Let me know if that works out for you. I had dillo working, but nothing that required multiple windows concurrently.