Flashing a Stock Z2 to Newest Debian Image (Windows edition)

[C4ptainNuggetS]

@huntergdavis Hi huntergdavis, I have a little problem. I successfully flashed my Zipit like you did. But I don't have my 2 gspi files. I delete them accenditialy. I tried to relaunch the flashing but it seems to not work. Do you have any idea ? Thanks

[huntergdavis]

@C4ptainNuggetS Yah you can get them a few different places online. There were a couple of userland images that had them included and they are probably still linked places (cough cough) online. There were also direct downloads for them on the sourceforge page too I believe. You should be able to get them in short order. best!

[theappleguy582]

i have two questions

1: when i do ipconfig it says no wireless extensions.

2:my mouse emulator doesnt seem to be working. I checked the files on the sd card and i couldn't really tell much im not that knowledgeable about the zipit hack. got any ideas?

thanks.

[Intanius]

@huntergdavis

will 16gb cards work

[huntergdavis]

@Intanius Should work, yes

[sandchris]

if there is no logo but just a picture that means the zipit is bricked right?

[huntergdavis]

@sandchris Nah, it is probably just not reading off of your SD card

[sandchris]

@huntergdavis well let me explain what happened i guess...i flashed it and after turning it back on all i got was that picture in the corner...no words...and two lights on the side of the zipit are turned on...i cant do anything to it...it cant turn off by itself, i have to take out the battery...so is it bricked?

[huntergdavis]

@sandchris Nope, not bricked. That picture lets you know the flashing process went ok, and it's trying (and failing) to read an operating system from the SD card. I would double check your userland image was written correctly to the SD card, but I believe your zipit is fine. Good luck!

[GalacticGuardian]

What are the specs of the Z2 and has anyone done any hardware hacking with it? Overclocking, perhaps? How much resources does it use, RAM and CPU etc, when idle? Are you using X or a framebuffer to play the videos and view images? Im sure its faster without a graphical environment. What's the batterie life like?

Sorry for all the questions. I'm considering buying a few of these for my buddies this Christmas so we can hack them to glory and I'd like to know a little mreo about them.

[huntergdavis]

@GalacticGuardian , these are all documented over at the zipit sourceforge page. Anecdotally, I've posted all these numbers over at my site. Framebuffer. 3 hours sometimes. Good luck!

[capitalsown]

OK, so this is completely unrelated, but it is something else you did. It's about the IM-ME thing. What exactly did you do to it? I don't really understand from reading the article.

[huntergdavis]

@capitalsown Basically some of us got together and put some driver implementations for the im-me on sourceforge, so you can use it like a little bash console, or irc etc device.

[capitalsown]

Oh ok. I read a few different articles on it and each gave me a different idea :p.

[PaToWlMc]

Sorry, but i'm stuck,. i got to load the linux logo, but nothing happen.

As far as i know the next step is linux to copy my zipit firmware.

Please tell me whats wrong hehe

[huntergdavis]

If you are seeing the linux logo the flash worked, the next step is to write the userland to card. If you're seeing the zipit logo, the flash didn't work.

[PaToWlMc]

@huntergdavis

In deed the flash worked, but whats next??

Should i get de 1gb image on the SD?? and how to rename it?

Thanks, asn you're the best!

[huntergdavis]

@PaToWlMc you can snag the newest image from the sourcefoge page, then just use dd to write it to disk. that should do it. Lots of stuff in the comments threads on my site.

[subassy]

Sorry if this is obvious but I cannot find the wireless+x+audio.tar.gz file. Any hints?

[huntergdavis]

Hey, it should be linked to from my site as well as off the sourceforge page. Probably named something like 1g or 2gimage.tgz etc. GL!

[subassy]

Thanks for the reply! I finally got it figured out. Just found that inconsistency very confusing.

[anakinseviltwin]

Im sorry for asking a probably stupid question, but where do i get aliosa27s Disk images and OE userland images?

[huntergdavis]

@anakinseviltwin They should be linked to on my site, his site, and the sourceforge page :)

[capitalsown]

Alright, so got a fresh sd with the image. Well, I don't know what happened, but Linux sees absolutely nothing on the drive. I open it in windows, I see the names that you would find in the average Linux filesystem, you know bin, usr, etc, whatever. But they weren't folders. They were all extensionless, 0 kb files. Now I don't know if you can unimage something, but I really don't want to pay another 11 bucks. This would be great if I get it to work, but It's been really finicky.

[huntergdavis]

Hey capitalsown,

Did you ever resolve this issue? You should be able to re-partition (un-image if you will) the card. Good Luck!

[capitalsown]

Ok so I just imaged a brand new micro on windows with physdiskwrite. I think I'll just finish off the rest of it under Fedora and grab the wifi firmware from my windows partition, because thankfully, Linux actually supports NTFS, unlike windows not supportig ext2 or 3.

[capitalsown]

It's asking me if I want to format my microSD when I try to open it after installing the driver.

[capitalsown]

I can tell you are a zelda fan.

[huntergdavis]

Nah, just use dd instead of phsydiskwrite and you'll be good

[capitalsown]

It won't let me view anything on my SD after writing the image without formatting it.

[capitalsown]

one more thing :p, were we supposed to turn it off after booting after flashing? My zipit will not turn off.

[huntergdavis]

Hey capitalsown,

So the flash went ok? You can probably shut down with 'shutdown -h now' . If the flash did go well, I suggest you try the newest userland image. This vid/article is a few releases back :) These questions have been answered a few times on the comments there too. Good lucK!

[capitalsown]

sorry. So windows is being dumb and won't let me erase the image, so I'm going to try this from my install of Fedora and follow your linux instructions. By the way, after the flash, I just can't turn it off. I tried shutdown -h, but typing didn't illicit a response from the device. but yeah, I think I'll just try and reformat the microSD and write to it with dd from Fedora.

[capitalsown]

Is there anyway at all to get rid of the image physdiskwrite writes to the microSD? I mean I will be in 30 dollars on microSD cards alone, and it's just silly. Formatting does nothing, except getting rid of files that were nothing and a folder with nothing inside of it. I mean both times, I'm left with a 1.7 GB microSD that should be like 3.7, stuck with an image I can't get off.

[huntergdavis]

Hey capitalsown, Yes. What you need to do is to repartition the card. You can do this using the disk manager in windows, or using gparted in linux. Windows doesn't see partitions on sd cards past the first one.

[capitalsown]

Sorry for all these comments, thanks, you've been very helpful. Alright, I'll see what I can do with gparted. If this works, I won't need to get another microSD. Thanks.

[capitalsown]

Alright, so I put the firmware files in notlibertas, then copied them to libertas after booting the zipit with the imaged card. I booted the zipit again, and nothing happened. The same unresponsive "OpenZipit" screen at startup with the little flashing underscore in the top left. I decided to open it in Linux. I see there is a text document on a partition in the microSD entitled "FIRMWARE_FILES_GO_HERE". I followed the files instructions, and put the files there. Booted the zipit. Still nothing.

[capitalsown]

I think I might have to reflash my zipit. It is refusing to boot from the microSD with the debian image on it. Would this be a good idea? Also, just out of curiousity, what Linux distro do you like most? Personally, I love Fedora with GNOME more than anything else.

[capitalsown]

Just want to say thanks again, you've been very helpful. Great tutorial, just something isn't working out on my end :p.

[huntergdavis]

Hey capitalsown,

I use ubuntu at home, and fedora at work. You shouldn't need to re-flash your zipit. At this point, I would try writing the disk image with the newest userland from rootnexus. It comes with the libertas driver already set up, so you shouldn't need to have 3 partitions on it.

[capitalsown]

Alright, so I should just reformat and get rid of my partitions on that microSD and just write SoundGuy's userland to it instead of Aliosa's? See my problem is the zipit doesn't seem to want to boot from the micro. Are you sure I don't have to flash it again to force it to boot from the next source in the sequence?

[huntergdavis]

Yes exactly.  Reflash and get rid of all partitions, then flash SoundGuy's new userland. If you are seeing a penguin when the zipit boots then there is no need to reflash it at all.

[capitalsown]

Okay, I know I am probably bothering you, and I can't thank you enough for taking time to help me. I just want to make sure I understand exactly what you are saying. Pretty much just reset my card to stock, then write soundguy's userland to it. Put it into the zipit, and boot?

[huntergdavis]

No problem. The userland from SoundGuy is actually a disk image you write with psydiskwrite, just like the other one. Other than that yeah, just write that to SD and see if it'll boot, good luck!

[capitalsown]

Ok I just got the 1 gb image from SoundGuy. It was a rar in five parts, and they are disk doublers. I don't know how to get this to an image, or even how to decompress them. All I know is they are some old Mac nonsense.

[huntergdavis]

@capitalsown Not exactly. Rar is a pretty common type of compression, you can unrar files in windows with 'winrar - free version from rarlabs' and in linux with 'unrar'. Once you extract the image from the rars, this is what you should write to the SD card.

[capitalsown]

No I know, they were rars, but when I decompressed them, they were .dd.tar.bz2

[capitalsown]

Like they were .dd.tar.bz2 files compressed into rar files.

[huntergdavis]

Right, so, .bz2 is bzip, you can use winrar or bunzip for that, .tar is a tar file, you can use winrar or tar/untar for that. .dd is the actual disk image.

[capitalsown]

I got shell access :3. A guy on the zipit freenode channel walked me through it.

[capitalsown]

ok I'm having knew trouble though. So I have soundguy's userland on my card, but when at login screen, every time I enter "root" or anything for that matter it says "unable to determine your tty name." this message is very brief, flashing up for a split second. I had to attempt to login a few times in a row to see what it said.

[huntergdavis]

I'd head on over to the rootnexux site and read the front page/getting started guide. I think this has been discussed on my page too, which has a better comment search function as of today. I believe the issue is that there is no root user set up by default, and you must log in as a user with a default password of debian I think

[capitalsown]

actually I got it all figured out. Thanks for the help. I just re extracted jag's userland to the card, and waited a few minutes this time before unmounting. It worked perfect this time. Everything is working great.

[huntergdavis]

Glad to hear it! Hope you enjoy using linux on the Z2 :)

[madjunir]

you're awesome man

i want to try this when i grab myself a zipit, but am on ubuntu right now, so any instruction different i should know about?

[huntergdavis]

Hey madjunir,

Thanks! I've done a linux tutorial and writeup over on my site. In general, you'll use DD instead of psydiskwrite. I also suggest you try the newest userland image, things have come a long way since this vid was first posted :) Good Luck!