I just came across a very exciting blog post on Mozzwald:

Ubuntu on the Zipit Z2

In all honesty, I don’t care much about Ubuntu.  It seems alright but I actually prefer Debian just slightly.  The really exciting part however is that mozzwald got gcc working!  Halle-freakin-lujah I’m glad someone finally tackled this problem.  There are a lot of things I like about Side-Track but there are also some broken things that were carried over from Rootnexus which I could do without.  Let’s dig in.

  1. firing up the Ubuntu VM on MacBook Pro
  2. download Mozzwald’s rootfs from right here http://www.mozzwald.com/zipit/zipit-ubuntu-rc1.tgz
  3. untar the image file into the home directory
  4. su to root.  Check this link to learn how to enable a root shell in Ubuntu
  5. dd if=zubuntu-jaunty-basic-rc1_05172010.img of=/dev/sdb (/dev/sdb on my system)
  6. with the flash card unmounted run gparted and expanded the partition on the flash card to the full capacity of the card
  7. download the Cozybit drivers from http://cozybit.com/projects/gspi8686/
  8. untar and rename the files to gspi8686.bin and gspi8686_hlp.bin, mount the flash card and copy them to /lib/firmware/libertas on the flash card
  9. unmount/eject the flash card and pop it in the Zipit Z2 (cross fingers)

Success!  It seemed to boot up nice and quick since it doesn’t boot into a window manager.  The l/p is user/ubuntu.  Right away I had to pull the Ubuntu root shell trick.

I’ve run into a small snag with the setup-wifi.sh not working properly but I think that will be sorted out soon enough.  I’ll report back after I’ve played with this distro a bit more.

Keep in mind that for this distro to work on your zipit, you’ll need to install the openzipit bootloader onto your device.  Instructions can be found here on Irongeek’s site.

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