Sure, sounds great! I’ll post it up for all to DL when it hits my inbox. My email shouldn’t bounce anything under 20megs, or you could split it into parts with cat or whatever no big. Thanks again for the hard work there! As for debian, sounds reasonable. I think eventually debian should be our default userland as they seem to update their repos with more frequency than angstrom, but it sounds like that’ll take some work.

This is a huge step we’re taking here distributing an image with working sound. I’ve already cross compiled a great deal of alsa capable utilities and emulators etc in preparation for a release image. Hopefully I can post up a followup image with some emulators and free roms for people to play with. Very good things!

Sure–I’ll go back to just a stripped version. I’ll send you a rootfs based on your userland distribution, but with sound and Xfbdev from the Angstrom and sweetlilmre packages. It shouldn’t take too long–can I email it for you to post for now? I assume h u n t e r ( at ) hunterdavis.com will work for a 10-15 MB attachment?

I’m going to hold off on posting a Debian image, since it’s substantially larger AND I haven’t figured out how to properly integrate (other than to replace binaries willy-nilly that seem to break busybox. It works, but there are inconsistencies with using multiple package management systems.

Nice on the sound!! I thought I had heard something like that in my old email Can you post up a root image or I’d be happy to host it here? I think one of the reasons the Z2 community kind of trickled down was that everyone kept starting from scratch. I think in a short order we can have a redistribution image beginners can use. Very cool things happening. I’d enjoy reading that blog too!

Good call on the yahoo discussion site. I found where Ken McGuire got alsa working (including recording if you feel like soldering). Sweetlilmre’s already got that z2-soc in his OE root for sound support, but I needed to load the modules in the right order and create the devices. There are a few scripts in Ken’s packages that (after a little modification) work like a charm. Sound quality out is excellent, though I’ve only run mp3s and avi with mplayer.

Ken’s post on Yahoo is here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/zipitwireless/message/2474

And my modified scripts reads:
#! /bin/sh
modprobe -v i2c-core
modprobe -v i2c-algo-bit
modprobe -v i2c-pxa
modprobe -v soundcore
modprobe -v snd
modprobe -v snd-page-alloc
modprobe -v snd-timer
modprobe -v snd-mixer-oss
modprobe -v snd-pcm
modprobe -v snd-pcm-oss
modprobe -v snd-soc-core
modprobe -v snd-soc-pxa2xx
modprobe -v snd-soc-pxa2xx-i2s
modprobe -v snd-soc-wm8750
modprobe -v snd-soc-z2
sleep 1
rm /dev/audio
rm /dev/dsp
rm /dev/mixer
mknod /dev/audio c 14 4 -m 666
mknod /dev/dsp c 14 3 -m 666
mknod /dev/mixer c 14 0 -m 666
mknod /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c c 116 24 -m 666
mknod /dev/snd/timer c 116 33 -m 666
mknod /dev/snd/controlC0 c 116 0 -m 666
mknod /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p c 116 16 -m 666

Again, I was lazy and got those kernel modules from sweetlilmre’s userland package instead of my bitbake. Once you’ve got the modules loaded (above) you’ve got to do some serious alsamixer toggling (it helps to save with alsactl). But then you’ll hear lovely noises from your speaker and headphones!

It’s funny, I received this device less than a week ago, and we have now a debian/ipkg X based media player linux internet device. It’s a pity the community around the Z2 has shrunk in the last year–all the previous contributions have made for one sweet little device.

I gotcha, shame xmodmap wouldn’t work that’d simplify things. It’s cool posting wherever, it’s helpful both to me and others who read your posts. Not sure if you need to use i2c for the audio setup. I seem to recall a zipit yahoo group email chain with instructions on using the new audio driver, but it’s been a while. Good luck!

xdotool type 1

But under heavy load, there can be a noticeable lag, since the zipit has to reload xdotool. Wish I knew how to define new keyboad maps for xkb…

Sorry to post scattershot all over your blog, but on sound, I’ve had some success at least loading the sound modules (/lib/modules/2.6.29/kernel/sound/soc/pxa/snd-soc-z2.ko), once I figured out the kernel modules I had from your wireless+x image were probably for a slightly newer kernel. Anyway, earlier modules now load (kernel 2.6.29) and I just need to figure out enabling the device with i2c (as mentioned below)?

http://linux.zipitwireless.com/projects/z2kernel/wiki/WikiStart#AudioRegisterSetup

As no /dev/dsp shows up, and alsamixer doesn’t detect a card yet
…

real: 0m 45.87s
user 0m 7.93s
sys 0m 1.18s

So it’s not too painful. The bigger issue is Alignment trap errors, but they just slow down the process. That and I tend to find myself running several applications (links, mutt, and snownews) in a screen session for one user, while installing packages in another. And unloading and moving around memory for the swap can take upwards of 4-5 minutes sometimes. Quite workable, though.

Did you find a solution for the the extended keyboard inputs? (ie 1,2,3, &,#, /. ? etc) when running in Xfbdev? I’m using openbox to map the Alt+keys using “xdotool”, but it’s pretty laggy. The better solution would be to figure out how to load an appropriate keymap, I guess. I’m also interested in the possibility of “sticky” or “toggle” keys for Shift, Alt, and Ctrl–loadkeys can do that in the framebuffer, but not in X.