HOWTO: Put Linux On A ZipIt Handheld

Linux ZipIt

AiboHack of all places has come up with quite an interesting hack. Turns out someone actually can make good use of the $100 ZipIt Instant Messaging device. The ZipIt (in case you didn’t know) has built-in 802.11b WiFi, a really cheap 320×240 LCD screen, and the ability to IM with MSN, Yahoo!, and AOL Instant Messenger. Groovy, but what good is this to us if we don’t have a WiFi spot to use? Not much. So with a little tweaking and some re-flashing, you’ll be running a sub-2mb version of Linux in no time. Here’s what you’ll need:

  • A Zipit device you are willing to screw up

  • A Windows PC (Windows XP recommended)

  • A WiFi card, or WiFi access point, attached to the Windows PC

  • Optional: Linux PC or cygwin running on Windows PC (for compiling your own Linux ARM apps)

19 thoughts on “HOWTO: Put Linux On A ZipIt Handheld

  1. ok great – i would love to try this hack myself, but i cant, as i coudln’t find a store here in au that sells them.

    I doubt that a SD card through a serial port will be very fast, but i guess its better than no storage.

  2. What would be perfect would be an sd card (or something simular), along with kismet … you can walk around sniffing wifi traffic, and all at the same time, saving the dump file to removable media. Go home, throw the card in a reader .. bam. No bulky or expensive equipment required…

    Although, i didn’t see if they actually have wifi drivers for the chipset that supply rfmon functionality.

  3. Neat hack. Let me know when you get lynx (or some other small text-only web browser) and a small email app running from the rom and I’ll pickup one of these in about an hour. The hard wired SD card idea would rock just as much, but alas that is beyond me.

    On a related idea, I wonder if you could hack something like the asus nfs server to work from batteries and a CF card (it’s all IDE ya know).

  4. why is it that everyone is trying to put linux on things? i know its smaller that most operating systems but what does it do. i know almost nothing about linux but everyone who knows about it has nothing but praise for it. so if anyone can tell me whats the deal please do.
    PARADOX

  5. why is it that everyone is trying to put linux on things?

    If you can put Linux on something, you can then run your own programs on it. (They would be Linux programs.) Linux is more useful than certain other operating systems (like Windows) for this purpose because the code is freely available for modification, so it can be stripped down and recompiled to run on certain kinds of devices. When you can run your own programs on something, you can do things like this hack – instead of running the stock IM programs that come on the ZipIt, you run whatever programs you can get to work.

  6. Found this with Google, somewhat late to the game. But is there a pure-Linux hack technique out there? That is to say, one that can be performed without the use of a Windows Pee Cee… I’m rather bereft of those at the moment, and it’s a situation I’d rather not alter… ;)

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