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mozzwald edited this page Feb 2, 2017 · 7 revisions

SD Card

To boot bleeding edge from SD Card you need a Zipit Z2 with the u-boot bootloader installed. If you have a stock Zipit (original factory bootloader/application) then you should follow the Internal Flash instructions below to get the new bootloader. If you have an older version of u-boot (or the latest) these instructions should work to run bleeding edge from sd card.

  • Format your sd card with an ext2 partition
  • Extract the rootfs to the sd card
    • sudo tar -pxvf openwrt-pxa-zipitz2-rootfs.tar.gz -C /path/to/mounted/sdcard/
  • Copy the kernel to /boot/uImage on the sd card
    • sudo cp openwrt-pxa-uImage /path/to/mounted/sdcard/boot/uImage
  • Properly unmount/eject the sd card from the computer and insert into the Zipit
  • Power on the Zipit and it should boot to bleeding edge

A common issue is that some sd cards don't seem to work in the Zipit. If you have an SD card that doesn't want to boot on the Zipit try the following:

  • Mount the sd card on a computer (check/repair file system errors if needed)
  • On the sd card, copy /boot/uboot.script.sdfix to /boot/uboot.script
    • sudo cp /path/to/mounted/sdcard/boot/uboot.script.sdfix /path/to/mounted/sdcard/boot/uboot.script
  • Properly unmount/eject the sd card from the computer and insert into the Zipit
  • Power on the Zipit and it should boot to bleeding edge

Internal Flash

An easy installation script/rootfs is available to install various Linux distributions on the Zipit. It runs from sd card on a stock or u-boot Zipit. More information about the script is available here. If your Zipit currently has the 2.6.29 kernel and boots with the "OpenZipit" Logo, follow the instructions here to get the u-boot bootloader before continuing. Follow these instruction to install the new bootloader and rootfs to internal flash:

The internal 8Mb of NOR flash on the Zipit has this layout like for bleeding edge:

Mtdblock Name Size(bytes) Start[hex] Size[hex]
0 u-boot 262144 0x00000 0x40000
1 u-boot-env 65536 0x40000 0x10000
2 kernel ? 0x50000 ?
3 squashfs ? ? ?
4 jffs2 ? ? ?
5 firmware 8060928 0x50000 0x7B0000

Flash partition sizes for the kernel, squashfs and jffs are automatically calculated at image creation time and follow the above layout. The firmware image file contains the kernel, squashfs and jffs which can be written to to mtdblock5 (firmware) from a bleeding edge booted sd card. If you modify (add) packages (via menuconfig) and the image file is larger than 8060928 bytes, the openwrt build will exit with an error stating such. Reduce your installed packages and try again.

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