Blank Slate

I've sorta lost momentum lately on the nano-x/fltk and sdlbasic projects, so I decided to spice things up a bit and take some risks mucking around with the internal flash on the zipit.  I had a zipit floating around that was loaded up with an older uboot and kernel from my earliest rockbox experiments on the wejp and z2lite userlands.  I thought it might be nice to replace all that with Mozzwald's spiffy looking OpenWrt rescue image.  So I booted it up in z2lite and ran his new uflasher script.  Not good.  Instead of the latest uboot and OpenWrt I get a blank white screen.  Probably shoulda booted z2sid instead of z2lite and flashed from there.  Oh well.  Live and learn.

Or maybe not.  I also had some unopened zipits with virgin stock in flash, just begging to be ruined as well.  Eh, why not...  I cracked one open, booted it up in IZ2S, and started tinkering with the stock files in /mnt/ffs.  It had no Zcovery app, just the start.sh script, the Zipit2 app, some wifi stuff and data files.  So I deleted the data files, replaced Zipit2 with an empty script file, and slightly modified the start.sh script to launch Z2covery (like it does in the updated stock filesystem you get after the virgin zipit phones home).  Then I created a modified version of the IZ2S Z2script.sh to work in /mnt/ffs on the internal flash instead of /mnt/sd0 on the SD card and saved that script as /mnt/ffs/Zcovery.  I also added dropbearmulti, the IZ2S power demons, and the fbcon drivers to /mnt/ffs.  Finally I booted it up without an SD card to see how much room I'd have leftover for a dedicated gmu internet radio (or rockbox) device running on the internal flash instead of the SD card.

Not bad.  Nearly 4 MB of the internal jffs is still available.  I think I can work with that.  Plus, the SD card automounts so I can use that to load different music, apps, or rockbox plugins on the fly at runtime, from a FAT formatted card.  Sweet!

Hopefully I can load this on virgin zipits to avoid the dreaded "Stock App of Doom" where the fresh from the box zipit gets permanently stuck in an infinite phone home and update loop.  I'm especially concerned about what happens when the update servers eventually go silent at zipitwireless.com.  Or have they already?