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.
March 19th, 2010 - 13:39
Hey hunternet93,
Thanks for the update! I’ll have to check that out. Sounds like the same situation I was running into with egoboo and scummvm initially. Probably requires a recompile with new sdl options for title screen render. Glad it’s going though, good luck!!
March 19th, 2010 - 21:00
Have you considered trying Angstrom on this device? It is more mobile-oriented than Debian, and might run faster. I sent a message on the Angstrom mailinglist asking questions about cross-compiling for the zipit. The desktop environment choices are GPE or OPIE, either of which would be great on the zipit. The only problem I can see is the lack of a touchscreen. The mouse emu should work, but much of the programs are optimized for a touchscreen. It might be possible to add one through the serial port.
March 19th, 2010 - 21:12
Hey hunternet93, check my previous posts and releases on angstrom
March 19th, 2010 - 21:18
I don’t see them, sorry. Could you give me a link or title? Guess I should’ve searched before a posted
March 20th, 2010 - 07:29
I see it now… Sorry for not search first.
March 21st, 2010 - 11:55
Hey hunternet93, no problem. I think the angstrom builds can be very fast, but for me having access to apt-get and apt-src are more important than a slight speed reduction. Let me know if you end up rolling a distro so I can link to it. Good lucK!
March 21st, 2010 - 12:30
I _think_ ipkg is compatible with .deb files, and apt might be installable. I’m no expert though. By the way, I got Dillo to work pretty well with the user agent string: “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 320×240)” Gmail.com still doesn’t work though… It gives me “ERROR: redirect loop for …[long url string]” I think its related to cookies. Do you use x2x to control your zipit? Its handy when you’re typing a lot near another computer.
March 21st, 2010 - 15:21
Hey hn93, I’ve used synergy which is similar, but usually end up either ssh’ing in or just doing typing with the tiny keys
March 23rd, 2010 - 04:42
The saddest thin is that after me and other people made donations there were no more updates…
It sounds so bad
March 23rd, 2010 - 15:50
Any news about an img to download, I’m a newby with linux, my knowledge is limited to write an img to a miniSD card. Anyone could send the img to daddoo(at)orange.fr woud be welcome !
March 23rd, 2010 - 16:53
Hey Anonymous #1. This is one of the many reasons why I never accept donations… makes you stick to a schedule. Still, SoundGuy put in a lot of good (unpaid) work, so even donations made after a product release still directly benefit the recipient and the quality of his (future) code. So I wouldn’t worry too much about that, karma and all that. If he doesn’t update soon somebody will take up where he left off, etc. The beauty of open source
March 23rd, 2010 - 16:54
Hey Anon#2, you should be able to directly download the newest rootnexus or debian release from links here on the site. The debian images on SF should also be in IMG format too, so that’s convenient
Good luck!
March 23rd, 2010 - 21:42
Got it running on a 8GB SD,
March 24th, 2010 - 13:23
Youtube videos are not loading in my zipit, they used to a couple of weeks ago, so I reinstall the image RC1-PRE2 to be sure it is not me, and still youtube videos are not loading. It starts the downloading, evan shows the mesagge window, and after a couple of minutes goes back to the links2 youtube webpage. Please confirm that this is not just me.
March 24th, 2010 - 13:36
Hey rsalazar335,
I’m a few thousand miles from my Z2 right now, but it sounds like youtube has either changed the frame layout of their page, or is trying to send the html5 video version to your browser. I imagine the youtube script will need to be updated. Good luck!
March 24th, 2010 - 13:44
Thank you (I was anomymous 2) I finally did it my with another image, this image I wanted isn’t avaible on the publisher website, he said some files were not copyright free and removed the whole file, what a pity !
March 24th, 2010 - 14:19
Flashed my flash and got Side-Track (www.irongeek.com) running great. Was going to try soundguy’s/rootnexus userland, but I can’t find the .img file to download. I was able to great all the files. Don’t know if I’m having a brain fart or what? A quick link or where a quick answer would be nice. Thanks.
March 24th, 2010 - 14:58
ok community. help me out. i’ve scoured the site, also rootnexus instructions, and before i toast another sdcard, i want to make sure i have this right;
download z2 userland bz2
b2unzip z2file.bz2 z2file.dd
sudo umount sdcard
sudo gparted ext3 and swap on sdcard
mkfs on the sdcard
dd the img to the sdcard
?
profit
using ubuntu netbook remix, 2gb microsd. does this appear to be the correct sequence for the 247MB file?
if not, what am i missing/screwing up/forgetting?
any help would be awesome, i can’t wait to lay the hack down on my zipit.
mixy
March 24th, 2010 - 21:47
@rsalazar335
what class is your SD card? I found that the zipit’s preformance is the best with a class 6 sd card. If you do not have one you can get them for about $20 for an 8GB one on ebay. Its worth it. This fixed the problem I was having with youtube not running properly and also improved every other program.
March 25th, 2010 - 05:17
rsalazar335:
There is an update for the youtube script. More info is available at my site http://www.mozzwald.com
March 25th, 2010 - 07:38
Is there any way to get the original root nexus builds, it looks like some of it has been removed from his page and am having a hard time figuring out if the files exist for a 2g standard rootnexus build. I see the sidetrack build but was hoping to branch a different way from the root nexus build then pen test appreciate any info you can provide.
March 25th, 2010 - 09:08
Hey Mixy,
You shouldn’t need to gparted the card if you’re going to DD the image to it. The image contains the partition table, so just dd to the /dev/sdx (not /dev/sdx1) and you should be good. Good lucK!
March 25th, 2010 - 09:11
Hey Mozzwald,
Thanks for the update! I’m sure folks appreciate all your hard work. It definitely shows!
March 25th, 2010 - 09:12
Hey Anthony,
I see his newest build is still up on the site. Not sure about the old ones, I didn’t keep a cached copy. Hopefully they’re still floating around
Good lucK!
March 25th, 2010 - 09:13
Hunter:
Thanks for the reply. So, i can dd the image to a 2gb card?
b2unzip imgfile.bz2 ==> imgfile.dd
dd imgfile.bz2 /dev/sdx
wow. if that’s it, i was complicating things quite a bit. will try after work.
thanks again for the quick response.
mixy
March 25th, 2010 - 10:14
Mixy: I used the Z2-RC1-PRE2.TAR.BZ2 file. Download it, format the SD card with a 256 MB swap partition at the end of the card, and fill up the rest with an ext3 partition. Then mount the SD card, and expand the contents of the tar.bz2 file to the root of the card, as superuser. Then unmount, put it in the zipit, and enjoy!
March 25th, 2010 - 10:16
The downside to the .img files is that they only allow you to use 1 GB of the card (correct me if I’m wrong).
March 25th, 2010 - 10:28
I think you can expand the 1gb partition after you dd it to the SD card. So if you dd the 1gb image to a 4gb card, eject and remount the card, then gparted should be able to expand it to whatever size. I could be wrong tho.
The old rootnexus images had some copyright issues I believe so that’s why he removed them. If I get some spare time, maybe I’ll go thru those images and remove the questionable material (provided I still have them).
March 25th, 2010 - 10:31
Hey Mixy, Yeah that sounds about right. Good luck!
Hey hunternet93, thanks for the info. I completely spaced adding a swap partition.
Hey mozzwald, yeah I’ve had success expanding using parted, just gotta make sure you don’t change the partition identifier or you’ll need to update your grub configuration to point to it.
Thanks guys!
March 25th, 2010 - 13:28
i think i toasted another card….
getting the same error msg as dan at the top of this page, bad superblock error, verbatim.
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
this was after a sudo umount /dev/sdc and then sudo dd if=/imgfile.dd of=/dev/sdc
this card no longer shows up when i plug it in, and will not mount. is it toast? can i reformat in a windows box? i’m buying -another- card tonight to try this out, but it would be super sweet if i could rescue my other little guys. thanks for the help, you guys are awesome!
March 25th, 2010 - 13:32
Hey Mixy,
None of your cards should be toast after writing, just maybe the partition table
. Dan’s issue was that his mount command referenced the wrong filesystem type, and was resolved. What was your mount command? Did it boot ok on the zipit? We’re gonna get this thing running , for sure. One thing to try is dd’ing the card as root, rather than as sudo. Don’t thing that this would be an issue, but you never know!
March 25th, 2010 - 13:44
Thnx for your gracious support.
I would like to know if there is a way to restore the unit with the factory zipit firmware and applications ?
March 25th, 2010 - 13:58
Hey Dadoo,
Sure. When you originally flashed the unit, the script should have backed up your original z2 firmware. I’ve not tried re-flashing it myself, but you should be able to dd it to the correct mntblock partition and restore the original firmware. Hope that helps somewhat, good luck!
March 25th, 2010 - 14:10
I mounted with sudo mount /dev/sdc with no luck.
tried the card in the zipit, nada.
so i have two cards that i need to repair the partition table on now. anyone feel like holding my hand through that one? let me know.