Great New Z2 Userland from RootNexus
Although I've been spending my time on other hacking projects besides the Z2 lately, that does not mean there's nothing exciting happening in the Z2 community. Our friend SoundGuy has finished putting together his Z2 root image, and it is slick! After working out some of the kinks with help from our comments (they are practically forums now...) threads, SoundGuy posted up a link to his newest "For the Average User" userland image. Terrific work! He's really got a good eye for usability. More info after the break.
You can find more info on his page here, and downloads on his page here.
For those of you who know me, you know I don't accept donations and usually tell potential benefactors to send the money to Haiti or another developer who might need the money. Looks like RootNexus has got a paypal donate page up, and he's done some great work, so consider donating to support him and his work.
March 2nd, 2010 - 17:28
Hunter,
Thanks for getting back to me on this issue. I’m feeling a little lame about having so many issues. It’s never easy! I re-dd’d the sd card and tried to mount the device as an ext3 file system…same problem:
derolph@ubuntu:~/Desktop/zipit$ sudo dd if=debianZ2-diskimage-2G.img of=/dev/sdb1
3970048+0 records in
3970048+0 records out
2032664576 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 1924.19 s, 1.1 MB/s
derolph@ubuntu:~/Desktop/zipit$ sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/external
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog – try
dmesg | tail or so
Should I try mounting the device in another distribution other than Ubuntu? Is there something else that you think I can try? This is perplexing.
Thanks,
Dan
March 2nd, 2010 - 17:56
Hey Dan,
I think I see your problem. Your command should be:
sudo umount /dev/sdbsudo dd if=debian.img of=/dev/sdbBy adding the 1 to the end of sdb, you were overwriting only the first partition of the card. I think this may be your issue. Hope this helps, good luck!
March 2nd, 2010 - 20:27
Hunter,
That was the trick! After doing a dd, writing the image, mounting the device, and writing the gsp* files to the filesystem, I booted the zipit and logged in. After logging in, I did a startx and the “water drop” splash page came up. Couldn’t really do much from here, the mouse was frozen (I moved the z2mouse-option to /bin). I’ll play with it a little and see if I can get the mouse to work. Without X running, everything looks good!
Thank you very much for all you help!
Dan
March 3rd, 2010 - 12:11
Hey Dan,
Glad to hear it. Did you hit the smiley face button to change the mouse emu into mouse mode? That may be it for that. Glad to hear things are going well!!
March 9th, 2010 - 20:14
Looks great! Has anyone figured a way to set the mac address to something other than 00:50:43:02:FE:01? I am trying to use the Zipit on a school network and it seems someone has already registered the default mac.
March 11th, 2010 - 13:02
After trying physdiskgui over and over to no avail I found a great little program to get the img on the sd card called ALL Image. 14 day trial. Google it. Works great.
March 11th, 2010 - 20:19
Vern: Use these commands in the terminal: “ifconfig eth0 down hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:01″, then: “ifconfig eth0 up” replacing eth0 with your wifi card’s name and 00:00:00:00:00:01 with your desired MAC address.
I just bough a Zipit to hack on. Does the zipit have any kind of graphics chip? How powerful is it? I’m not expecting much…
March 11th, 2010 - 23:46
hunternet93:
No graphics chip, but powerful processor for its class.
March 17th, 2010 - 16:32
Hi there!
I was thinking about including a script to set time/date at startup.
At which point of the boot process the script must be invoked?
(boot sequence)
Obviously it must be done as root…
Regards.
March 17th, 2010 - 18:16
I got my zipit today! It has the latest userland running smoothly right now. Links2 leaves some things to be desired though. I installed Dillo, and its better. If there was a option to spoof the user agent as a mobile browser so google etc would show the mobile varients of their pages. Also, does anyone here know of any good online games that can run on the zipit? I know quake would work, but it would be hard to play. Maybe a liero-like game of some type?
March 17th, 2010 - 18:40
Hey Vincenzo,
I think you can just add it to rc.local..
Hunternet93,
Online games on the Z2… I know gnuchess works well. You could probably get freecraft or similar running pretty nicely too. I’d be interested to know if you get liero/wormux/etc working, fun games. Good luck! As for spoofing the user agent in dillo, can you not set it in .dillorc? Otherwise you’ll probably have to recompile, but luckily dillo is only 3 files I believe.
March 17th, 2010 - 19:27
I just tried wormux and it didn’t work… I had to kill -9 it. I’ll be testing other games. I haven’t checked .dillorc, but there is some options in the prefs to change user agent. Maybe I can add some, I’ll have a look. Back on the subject of games: I’m about to try Atomic Tanks, it is a very simple game so it might work.
March 17th, 2010 - 21:08
I did some playing around with dillo but it ended up not being usefull although it did make website look a little better then links2. The problems that I had with it was that 1) gmail did not work. witch it what I wanted it for and 2) you have to use the mouse. I wanted it to be more like Links2 in the fact that I could get around pretty quickly.
here are some things that I changed in the dillorc file:
geometry=320×240
user_agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.0.1; en-us; Droid Build/ESD56) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17″
start_page=”file:/home/user/.links2/start-page/search.html”
Give that a try if you find how to get gmail to work and if you find any other good settings let me know.
March 18th, 2010 - 11:14
If I could find a valid user agent string for mobile browsers I think it would work. Something along the lines of IE Mobile. On my old ipaq gmail had a good mobile interface. Crimson Fields looks like a good game for the zipit as it has been ported to other mobile devices, but it has errors on startup. I’ll work with it and see if I can fix it. I think the programs included in this userland should be changed to even lighter ones. GPE’s programs should work, I’ll mess with that too.
March 18th, 2010 - 11:51
Hey MattyG thanks for the info!
Hey hunternet93 I agree CF should work ok on the Zipit with some tweaking. I’m interested to hear how this goes, good lucK!
March 18th, 2010 - 17:56
Crimson Fields runs well when running with the options –width 320 –height 240. The title screen isn’t scaled so only a corner of it is showed, just click to bring up the menu. I had a problem where the /usr/share/games/crimson/locale/en.dat file was corrupted, so I just copied it from my laptop’s working installation. Its fun to play, but would be better if there was a real networked version not just play-by-email.