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.
February 8th, 2010 - 16:04
Thanks for the updates!
What is the difference w/ the 1gb image?
February 9th, 2010 - 09:06
Suggestion: in my system, I bound the Home button to the Fluxbox main menu, and the center d-pad button to Enter, so that I can activate the menu and choose items sans mouse-mode. Very handy for me, and I can see it would work well on your set up too. Haven’t figured out how to call lxpanel’s menu just yet though.
February 9th, 2010 - 17:39
@hard_where:
I posted the 1gb image so windows users can easily test it. No difference between 1gb and rootfs.
Im working towrads a good final usable release with a reduced disk space usage footprint.. At that time ill release a few difference size images for ease of installation.
@Negative3Kelvin
I would like to bind a button to lxpanel, I did a quick search a few nights ago when I had a moment and I could not figure out how to do it. I know its got to be possible without compiling from source. If you do find out tell me. HEH
Thanks for your suggestion.
February 11th, 2010 - 15:32
@soundguy or anyone who knows,
Does this image or any other method include a way to have the keypresses repeat at a useful rate for emulated gaming?
Pressing the arrow key over and over is not a fun way to play a side scroller.
This looks cool as heck and as soon as I can find some time my z2 will be getting a new rootfs.
February 11th, 2010 - 17:46
You can map a key to run `lxpanelctl menu` which will popup the lxpanel menu. Also, `lxpanelctl run` will open a run dialog.
February 12th, 2010 - 11:57
bit of a noob question here. I’ve downloaded rc-pre2-dd parts 1 through 5. I have 7zip installed, but how do I extract them all to get the image file. I realize that this may not be the most apropriate forum for this question, and I apologize for that, but any help would be greatly appreciated.
February 12th, 2010 - 12:57
ok i combined them and it gave me a .dd file. where’s the .img file?
February 13th, 2010 - 12:58
rename .dd to .img and then write
February 13th, 2010 - 19:33
@grayfox386
I’m pretty sure I tried that but I’ll give it another go. thanks for the reply.
February 14th, 2010 - 17:45
Can some one tell me how to add stuff to the desktop? I love it, but I want more desktop clickables.
February 15th, 2010 - 06:47
how do you dissable the auto shutdown? mine only stays on for 180 seconds unless i have it pluged in, even at 100%
February 15th, 2010 - 14:36
Hello,
Any progress towards the next release? Looking forward to it!
February 15th, 2010 - 18:15
I’m drooling over the zipit… Where’s the best place to buy one? The closest Target store didn’t have them… I’ll probably check out Big Lots. I’d like to get one for less than the $50 on Amazon, but I’ll buy it if I can’t find anything better.
February 16th, 2010 - 10:41
@Nonya-Biz and Soundguy
I have the same problem with the auto shutdown in 180 even at full charge. I think it happends now because the backlight is MAX by default, whe in the previous release it was set to 500 (screen) and 0 (keyboard). Soundguy: where can we change the defaults for backlight?
The WIFI connection script: Option 5, does not show the short list of available WIFI as in previous releases.
Thank you very much for your great work.
February 16th, 2010 - 12:20
Wonderful work!
I am kind of newbie… Then, I am having some trouble getting things working.
I need some help.
After flashing my Zipit, I extracted Z2-RC1-PRE2.TAR.BZ2 to a 1gb card (previously partitioned 750mb-ext3/256mb-swap). I booted from the SD and within 1-2 minutes it showed desktop. It hangs from there. Mouse is not working (it did briefly the first time I booted) and I do not know how to use hot keys (ctrl???). I had to unplugged the BATT in order to turn it off (shame on me…).
Could be a problem the way I extracted rootfs directly to the SD card (with File Roller from GUI Ubuntu). I have doubts about this since I didn’t use the image at all, and soundguy instructs to copy with the -RvPp flags in order to preserve file permissions.
Could be the need of some script I am missing?
I hope I have given an accurate description of my situation and my impressions.
I will appreciate any suggestion…
Best regards.
Once again: soundguy, thanks!
February 16th, 2010 - 14:25
Does anyone knows how to switch between weapons in Quake1 on the zipit? the number keys do not work.
February 16th, 2010 - 14:40
Anyoen have thoughts on the upcoming release of MeeGo? http://meego.com/devices/handheld
February 16th, 2010 - 14:41
Anyone have thoughts on the upcoming release of MeeGo? http://meego.com/devices/handheld
February 16th, 2010 - 14:58
I think that both your problems is that you need to press option.
The option button changes mouse and num keys. When the mouse is in use, the top keys are function keys. Press the option key when you start up to use the mouse, and press it again to get the numbers back and use the arrow buttons.
So Vincenzo, I think, less I am missing something, you need to press option. I hope that it is something that simple. Cause if not, I am sorry.
As for rsalazar, the mouse and arrows can control Quake, but with the mouse, there are no numbers, just functions. So press the options button and use the arrows instead.
February 16th, 2010 - 15:00
Sorry for the double post.
Does anybody know a good arm mp3 player? The built in one doesn’t have shuffle, ect.
February 16th, 2010 - 21:37
Thanks Stephen Bell!
Mouse working as expected.
Some new issues came up…
1)when I plug it to the AC adapter it starts to boot.
(i have to wait untill it starts and turn it off even then no led lights indicates me if it is charging or not)
Is anyone obtaining the same behaviour? Should LEDs still be working factory way to indicate charging-in-process?
2) After booting the taskbar dissappeared, and never came back.
How do I have it again?
Excelent community.
Very supportive,
Thanks
So far
February 17th, 2010 - 13:40
Sorry to post again…
1) About the AC adpator issue I’ve been making some tests with the following results:
With Z2 turned off, if plugged, it turns on and start booting by itself just because it was plugged. No batt led light.
After booting process finishes, if unplugged and plugged again, the batt led goes steady green.
If I proceed to shut it down by pressing the “on button” and clicking shutdown, it turns off correctly in 15 secs but the green led light goes off, apparently not charging at all.
2) I copied again the rootfs to the sd card to try to recreate the missing-taskbar issue: no luck so far. There must be something I did when I was exploring the system the first time.
Five very simple questions/comments now:
3) Where can I find an explanation of the Z2 keyboard? (I mean, the use of smiley, Prev/Next, Z key, Home, as Options works for mouse pad).
4) When asked to do so I press [. . . ] + c to start in console. It writes on the screen ^c but nothing happens. It proceeds booting to gui.
5) Probably because of the way I copied the rootfs to the sd card (I did it as root) I don’t have user permissions to write in /home/user, hence I can not modify, for example, .bashrc. How should I extract rootfs from Z2-RC1-PRE2.TAR.BZ2 to the sd in order to preserve permissions?
6) I am ashamed of this one: system always boots from the sd card, right? I mean: there is no installation to the zipit itself. Correct?
7) Startup to gui: 4 min. 42 secs. Shutdown: 15 secs.
(any ideas why, compared to what i have read in this almost-forum, it takes my zipit three times to boot and shutdown?)
Thanks!
February 17th, 2010 - 18:59
I am almost as new to this as you, just had mine a week now, but I hope this helps some.
1. As for the battery led, I have to unplug and plug.
2. The taskbar thing, well, I have had that happen a few times. I have to re DD it, nothing else I can find to fix it. I hope someone can help with this too.
As a side note, for me, this has only happened if I just unplug the power/reset instead of shuting it down.
3. I haven’t been able to find anything about the keyboard myself, but I have figgered about the function keys, the … is ctrl, or maybe alt, not sure. The key between the alt and space is a shift. The smily face is Ctrl Q, I belive, always shuts things down for me. Um, when in mouse mode the center button is left click, and the stop button is right click. When in keyboard mode, the middle button is end and the home button is home. That is all I figgered out so far.
4. Eh, I think that is just to put it into verbose mode.
5. Sorry can’t help there.
6. Yeah, there is just not enough space to boot much from anything but the SD. Least, far as I know. The only thing that is on it really is the kernel I belive.
7. Again, sorry, never counted. But I don’t think my takes near that long.
February 17th, 2010 - 20:44
Hi all. I’ve been digging this setup, but I think I hosed something during the last update/upgrade. At one point, it asked about keyboard setup. I rather stupidly went with the default 105 key keyboard. I wasn’t sure what alternative to use. Now it appears that some of the keys don’t respond to keypress. Any thoughts? Thanks!
February 19th, 2010 - 12:33
Probably an obvious issue…
if zipit can’t keep time, there is no way to use apps like “when” or “task”, right?
Is it possible somehow to work with time?
Among my main interests is to replace my pda with zipit.
As far as I can see, I am not going to get away with it…
Regards.
February 19th, 2010 - 15:02
Soundguy, are you still around? When’s the next release?
@Vincenzo – Maybe take a look at syncing time with ntp.
February 20th, 2010 - 07:29
I’ve been playing with NTPD, and hwclock, but don’t see how to make the RTC keep consistent and accurate time. When the zipit goes into sleep mode, the titme is wrong until the next time NTP syncs. plus there is no timezone file in /etc (easy enough to create). Anyone have a clue?
February 20th, 2010 - 08:06
Yeah, sorry, I don’t care much about time. While I would like it right, I don’t worry about it. So never looked to far into it.
As for the keyboard, no idea.
One of my big bugs, however, was the crappy mp3 player. Ok, I shouldn’t say crappy. It plays well, with low CPU. However, I have found a better one. Still text based, cause GUI’s kill the CPU, but it has shuffle, libary, playlist support, and my fav, random play. Called CMUS. I would recommended it as a great replacement for the music player. Soundguy, you should check it out. Maybe use it in your next userland.
February 22nd, 2010 - 04:20
Thanks. I used this userland as the basis for my Side-Track project
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/zipit-z2-hacking-userland-side-track
It’s meant to be a pen-testing platform.
February 22nd, 2010 - 08:52
Very cool distro irongeek, I’ll have to check that out this weekend
February 22nd, 2010 - 14:01
I’m still having problems with this install. I renamed the .dd file to a .img file so I could use physdiskwrite like Grayfox said. The file is now called 1gb.rc1-pre2.img and is 982MB. Physdiskwrite is not working so I switched to win32image writer and it tells me I havn’t enough space on the sd card. The Card was formatted with Fat(default) 16kb (is that FAT16?) and has 968MB free. I gave up on windows last night and gave it a try on YDL. I am a complete noob at linux. Still stuggling to learn. Anyway I managed to wipe my linux box trying to partition the sd card! No biggie. It was a fairly new install and I am currently reinstalling it. Anyway any help would be awesome!
February 22nd, 2010 - 15:08
Hey fracaspunk1,
Depending on what filesystem type and blocksize you use to partition the card, different cards will have different amount of free space reported. Partitioning it ext2 with a high blocksize may solve your issue, but it’s also possible that your card doesn’t physically have enough space (968 vs 980). It’s also possible that there were some bad sectors on the card when you formatted with windows. If that were the case, dosfsck may have marked some sectors as ‘bad’, and a smaller size would be reported… I am thinking this is unlikely.
If you’re concerned about wiping your box again when you go to partition the SD card, here’s a quick runthrough:
1. boot your linux box without the sd card plugged in
2. type ‘dmesg’ into a terminal
3. plug in the sd card
4. type ‘dmesg’ into a terminal again
5. The second dmesg will tell you what device the sd card is loaded as (probably /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdc1)
6. The device reported is what you’ll format. You could also start gparted directly with this as a parameter, so it’ll only show this drive. “sudo gparted /dev/sdb1″ should do it.
Good Luck!
February 23rd, 2010 - 02:19
Hmm well after all the work my z2 isn’t holding a charge without being plugged in. Why can’t it charge if the power is off and it’s plugged in?
February 23rd, 2010 - 14:37
Yeah, that is the wave of the future unfortunately. Most modern devices need to be on to charged too. That was a Q over at the Pandora forums about that, and they said it has too turn on too in order to charge, but they are going to make a minikernal just for charging down the road. I doubt a zipit can do that, so to charge we are going to just have to leave it plugged in.
February 24th, 2010 - 09:18
Hi Hunter,
Thank you for your help and comments in the past, and the information on your site. It’s all been very helpful.
I now have a z2 based on rootnexus’s work using icewm. Have vnc working and can connect to open, wep or wpa access points. In fact everything is running well except video. What settings do you use to encode video for the z2 and what mplayer options do you use?
Also has anyone used the z2 to compile? If so what needs to be installed?
(Apologies for the slightyly off topic post, this place is a mine of info and minds)
Kindest regards
James
February 24th, 2010 - 15:23
Hey James,
No problem. For the video settings, I had used the mplayer settings from my “Hulu on the Z2″ post and that worked for most video streams. I know that a few users had tweaked their settings a bit to lower bitrate, lower bitrate audio too. Those are probably floating around in the comments.
For compilation, you’ll just need whatever libraries you’d normally install to compile on any debian system. So for c/c++ you’d need g++, libc-dev, gdb, etc etc. Good luck!
February 24th, 2010 - 15:28
I have had a problem with writing the 2GB disk image to the microSD. The 1.85 GB available on the 2GB cards does not appear to be enough for the image. I have screwed up 2 micro cards. I have a 4 GB card that I want to try now. Can I dd the image straight to the card, or do I have to partition the card to have a 2 GB partition? If I do have to partition the card, should I just use fdisk to create a 2GB primary partition and install the image to that partition?
Thanks,
Dan
February 24th, 2010 - 15:30
Hey Dan,
You should be able to dd the image straight to the card. Once you’re sure that the image works, you can use gparted etc to resize the partition to fill the disk. Good Luck!
February 24th, 2010 - 16:06
Hay James, does icewm do good on the Zipit? Any special setting needed? I am not really a linux n00b, but dang near, so any good info on it?
February 24th, 2010 - 17:02
Hey Stephen,
I’ve used Icewm on the z2 off and on, and there are some things you can do to tweak the experience. I like to have the cpu and memory monitors on the taskbar, but also have the taskbar auto-hide. At 320×240, it’s not bad.
February 24th, 2010 - 18:12
Hunter,
The dd of the 2GB image to my 4GB card appeared successful (no errors). The problem is that I can’t view/access/mount the card to move files to it. I am using Ubuntu. Disk Utility says that the device is “Unrecognized”, so automount is failing. I have tried to manually mount the device and it also complains about wrong filesystem. Should I try another image or am I overlooking something?
Thank you very much for your help!
Dan
February 24th, 2010 - 18:24
Hey Dan,
Hrm… Did you write the card as root? Did you dd it to the /dev/sdx device? What was the command you used? You should be able to see it in ubuntu which concerns me… but I’d give it a try on the Z2 just in case. For mounting what was the command? Also what does your partition table look like for the card? Does parted/gparted see all the partitions? These would be good things to check, figure out what’s gone awry. Good Luck
February 24th, 2010 - 18:49
Hunter,
The command that I used for dd was:
sudo dd if=debianZ2-diskimage-2G.img of=/dev/sdb1
It came back saying that 2GB were successfully written. For mounting, I used:
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/external
and/or
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/external -o uid=1000,gid=100,utf8,dmask=027,fmask=137
but both gave me:
“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”
parted for the device gave the following:
Model: Generic USB SD Reader (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 3959MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 4194kB 3959MB 3955MB primary
I put the card in the Z2 and the OpenZipit splash screen can up with the Penguin, but it just hung…no login. So the image might not have been successfully copied over. Should I redo the dd?
Again, thank you very much!
Dan
February 24th, 2010 - 21:56
I have recently purchased my Z2 and have a few question.
Right now have it running off of a 1gb chip. It runs fairly well and I am very happy with it and its a lot of fun to show off. I do have a few problems when trying to use the IM application and if i try to play a youtube video. My Zipit will hang and freeze and i may never be able to do a proper shutdown and have to pull the battery out. I don’t like doing this and was wondering if there was some force shutdown i can do?
I have ordered an 8gb Class 6 MicroSD and was wondering if I would be able to expand the swap and if I was able to would it make much of a difference with performance?
Is there an easy way to switch between windows/tasks?
I noticed that if i was to close my zipit and reopen it that the backlights on the keyboard will not turn back on. This is not a big problem as sometimes I dont want the keyboard on. I was just wondering if there was a way to change the brightness of both the screen and the keyboard.
This is a very neat protect and a fun device to play with.
February 25th, 2010 - 04:13
MattyG
playing youtube videos can take quite awhile. its slow give it a few min and see if it starts.
there is a pin hole in the side of the zipit you can use as a reset button.
There are some hotkeys as follows :
[Options] = enable mouse via d-pad
ctrl+f=fullscreen
ctrl+z=prev window
ctrl+l=close
The keyboard back-light should actually default to off on the keyboard as its a real drain on the battery. There is a power management file you can edit if you want to have the light on but by default it should be off.
ctrl+d=desktop
February 25th, 2010 - 11:35
@MattyG:
Does pressing the power button bring up the shutdown menu? This should work on the newest Rootnexus image.
You can increase the size of the swap partition using some Linux tools. On Ubuntu, try Gparted,
Try CTRL-N to switch between windows.
To change the brightness on the screen and keyboard, you can modify (as root) /etc/power-management.sh and set the values to what you prefer. I am currently working on a post about a command line script to change the brightness. Check out my site at http://www.mozzwald.com
February 25th, 2010 - 17:07
Hey Stephen,
icewm works really well for me, I did need to turn off the desktop icons as per rootnexus’ instructions, and now it works really well. I use dillo as a webbrowser for normal use and midori for special needs (coz its slow). Just apt-get install icewm and then change the settings in /home/user/.xinitrc (probably change matchbox or fluxbox to icewm)
kindest regards
James
February 25th, 2010 - 17:59
Cool, I will check it out on my backup card.
O, and Dan I have 3 SD card readers. One buitin into my Eeepc, and 2 usb ones. The eeepc one always show unpartitioned space, and the USB ones work. Don’t know why.
February 26th, 2010 - 08:20
Hey Dan,
Sorry for my lateness getting to your post. It looks to me like you’re using the wrong filesystem descriptor to mount. After ‘dd’ing the card to the disk, you should mount it as an ext3 partition, not vfat. That would explain the “wrong fs type” messages you’re getting. Hopefully it should work for you. Good Luck!
February 27th, 2010 - 12:30
I have yet another problem. I like Cmus as a media player. There is one problem, it needs to be root to access the sound driver for some reason. Log in as user, says error, root, all good. I have it added to my menu, and tried using sudo cmus, but that doesn’t work. I have to su root and then cmus to use it. Is there any way around this?
If not, how would I change it to boot to root instead of user?