Today started and I was getting ready to baby sit my niece for several hours. But then that fell through and it started snowing so it even more fell fell through. So I spent a large portion of the day working on Linux on my new Zipit Z2 gadget. I ordered it I don’t know how many weeks ago. Then I had to order a memory card to do anything useful with it. Finally I had all the ingredients and I followed the stereo-typically poorly written instructions to get it installed. I got the idea from a video webcast I watch called Hak5. I followed their instructions as well as reading instructions I found. There were still details left out and and typos but I still manged to get it done.
The device is basically like a miniature laptop. Or more accurately the form factor is a lot like a laptop, the hardware is more comparable to that of a smart phone. It’s completely open and everything, the manufacturer has no problem sharing the kernel and releasing all kinds of technical specs and source code and whatever.
Anyway I installed this initial Linux image by “raw-writing” a gigabyte image to a microSD card. The Zipit basically boots off the memory card into a little X.org setup. I went through all this trouble then found out there was a simple “average user” image available that installs in a fraction of the time. Kind of wish I had just jumped directly to that one. Anyway I decided my new bright idea was to install this web-based admin tool on it called Webmin. But first I had to install all the decencies. This was made relatively easy with the availability of apt-get install it still took me a few hours just to get the dependencies. Then, finally, at long last I went to install the main Webmin package itself. But it took so long with the CPU at 100% and the memory card going full-write speed that the Zipit’s back light went out and I couldn’t wake it up. So I rebooted it.
Let me take a minor detour here and mention the clock on this thing. Maybe there’s an easier way to set the clock on this thing, maybe there isn’t but it took me literally hours to find the combination of date and time to feed the various date/time utilities in this Linux distro before I finally got it to work right. And now of course I had to reset it again and didn’t save that page so I don’t know if I’ll ever have that time set right again. Hopefully there’s an internet time-synchronization type package I can install. Now, where was I?
When it came back up from the long installation routine I managed to get the thing back connected to wifi and tried the default address of the zipit along with port 10000 and to my amazement it did actually come up. I logged in as root and there was webmin.
Unfortunately the CPU stays at 100% and the pages are loading agonizingly slowly. So if I can manage to get this thing’s CPU back down to normal I am going to remove webmin and all those dependencies. It was a fun experiment and I proved I could do it so I still count this as a net gain…
In between the webmin stuff I also tried to find a decent MP3 player. The kind that would be able to pick up where it left off the last time the player was running even if the player was shut down. I’m not sure if that is actually possible. I was really hoping I could use this zipit as kind of a strange Mp3 player-replacement thing. I did actually manage to install VLC although I’m still not sure if that will fulfill my needs or not. I need something that will just play my list of MP3s every week and just pick up where it left off before. Actually the “alternative firmware package” rockbox already fulfills all these needs. The only thing missing is rock box on the zipit. I think rockbox even supports the CPU, although I’m not sure. In any case I wish I know that kind of stuff I knew how to port it over so I could just boot rockbox off of a memory card when I wanted to do that and use a different memory card otherwise. That would be pretty neat. Or be really fancy and have a dual-boot setup. That would be extra really.
And the theoretically user-friendly image I’m using has a FTP and telnet daemon already running by default. So I issue commands via telnet and transfer files back and forth via FTP. Makes it much easier to issue commands on a real keyboard. And since the one Ext2 driver for windows sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t FTP works as well as anything. A not about the web site of the user-friendly image: I didn’t ever resort to using a linux machine and managed to get it set up perfectly fine thank you. Nor did I install coLinux, Wubi, Cygwin or whatever else. I just used basically a convenient GUI to a dd-link utility, called PhysiDiskWrite. The GUI is in German but I somehow managed.
So yes, as you can see I’m feeling enthused and excited about the Zipit toy I have here. Just hope I can manage to find a good MP3 player or someone figures out how to make rockbox bootup on the zipit.
I did actually also do some packing and organizing as well. Just not a whole lot because the zipit was quite distracting. Okay here’s some useful links related to today’s post: