[karosium] sent in this one. He(?) put in alot of effort on this one. After flashing the EEPROM on the ZipIT he got the PIXIL embedded linux distro running on the ZipIT. It’s a work in progress, but the web browser works. Even if you don’t have a ZipIT, it’s worth checking out. There’s mention of building a PLCC32/DIP32 flasher built from an old PII. Great work!
Cue tripling of price on eBay in 3, 2… (happens with every other device that linux gets thrown on, even to the point where they cost more than the devices they sought to be cheaper versions of)
Posted at 11:34 pm on Oct 20th, 2006 by Triikan
@#2
Just make it a ‘watched item’ or a keyword, let a few weeks go by and you’ll see them drop back down in price again. I’ve got about 15 things that I ‘watch’ for that routinely popup here, slashdot, and digg.
Posted at 1:17 am on Oct 21st, 2006 by Alexander
ZipIts are still available new at Best Buy for less than $100. (Although now that I’ve mentioned this, possibly not for long.) Just do a search at bestbuy.com.
Posted at 7:14 am on Oct 21st, 2006 by Andrew
I’ve seen them on sale at RadioShack as well.
Posted at 12:54 pm on Oct 21st, 2006 by TJ
ZipIts don’t seem to be going for any higher, or at all, on eBay there’s only one listed right now.
Not that horribly exciting, with a mono screen and not alot of RAM, storage, or expandability. A quick Froogle search brings up this site selling them for $55: http://www.pcliquidations.com/item.asp?referid=160164167166161&id=2080
Posted at 2:19 pm on Oct 21st, 2006 by tom61
Kinda odd that the price going up is the only thing being commented on, as linux zipit stuff has been on hackaday at least 3 times.
monochrome, rubber keyboard like that, doesn’t come with backlight, need to solder for an SD card for actual storage is too many compromises from what I want in a tiny computer
Posted at 8:14 pm on Oct 21st, 2006 by Doctor Whom
These zipits are tough to find… First of all, nobody has them in my area. Tigerdirect used to have them, but they were over priced. When I was desperate enough to get it from TD, they had removed it from their inventory. And then I went on a trip to Minnesota and walked in to every damn toys r us, radio shack, best buy, target, ANY electronics store. Nobody had heard of it.
And they hardly ever appear on ebay. When they do, the seller isn’t shipping to Canada :(
Zipit good!
Posted at 2:27 pm on Oct 22nd, 2006 by strider_mt2k
uh, my $90 ebay’d jornada720 is exponentially superior to this.
Posted at 11:37 pm on Oct 22nd, 2006 by sfeng1
I walked into Bestbuy 2 days ago (after seeing this article) and bought one for $79. They had 3 different colors.
I got linux on it, but I have found that there are lots of websites on this, but none of them have much information. There don’t appear to be any (active) discussion groups on the matter. I’m fairly disappointed, actually. Not so much in the product, but the lack of good websites on the product.. and lack of any precompiled binaries of anything. I hate trying to compile stuff myself, that is why I stopped using Linux on my desktop computer years ago.
Posted at 11:39 am on Oct 26th, 2006 by David Murray
amadeus at dslinux.org is currently trying to port PIXIL to the Nintendo DS by way of DSLinux. He should be able to do it, since he made the RAM extensions work and stuff by circumventing 8bit writes and now we all have 36MB of RAM, so… :P
Posted at 9:13 pm on Oct 27th, 2006 by chuckstudios
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very nice, i mean very nice. those zipits are pretty cheap, and anything with linux is good. i would love to do this sometime. more hacks like this please!
Posted at 9:28 pm on Oct 20th, 2006 by thejoeandchip