I’ve been toying around with my ZIPIT Z2 Messenger
since I received it on March 10th. The first thing I did after un-boxing it was to hack it of course. It’s a linux-based device at heart but by replacing the bootloader with the openzipit bootloader and imaging a micro sd card with Irongeek’s side-track distribution the Zipit shows it’s untapped potential. It’s certainly not perfect in many regards but at the same time it’s quite usable. One complaint I had was that the wireless configuration utility that is included with side-track is clunky and confusing. I ran into rkdavis on the #zipit channel on freenode and he has been writing a small script to make it a bit easier to connect to a wifi network. I played with the script a bit and he has updated it with some of my suggestions to make it more compatible with Debian-based distributions on the Zipit Z2 such as side-track. It’s a neat little script that uses the dialog utility for a polished interface. Anyone who has ever “make menuconfig’d” something is familiar with what dialog looks like.
We still have some hitches to work through but here is a link to the Easy Wifi Configurator a.k.a. EWoC. Look around rk’s site though because he may have a newer version by the time you read this post. Small word of warning, you will need to “apt-get install dialog” in order to run the script.
