What's all this?

In general OpenZipit is a collection of sources, patches and How To's that describe a set of replacement applications for the Zipit Instant Messageing device. It is (hopefully) a work in progress and should not be considered complete in its current form.

Applications:	This folder contains applications and tools neccessary to build the root filesystem contained in ramdisk.gz

	Buildroot:	This folder contains applications that may be built by buildroot. Modifications, .mk and config.in files are provided. Buildroot is configured to build arm-linux-gcc 3.4.2, and all these applications are compiled with that toolchain. The kernel is NOT compiled with gcc 3.4.2.
	aumix:	ncurses audio mixer control panel
	busybox:	BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The only modification to busybox is the regression of vi.c to an earlier version.
	dropbearv.45: The only modification is to the config.in, dropbear_sshd.mk files to support .45, and options.h to use /dev/urandom vs /dev/random.
	libid3tag:	id3tag library, added config.in & libid3tag.mk to build under buildroot.
	libmad:	mp3 decoder library, modified libmad.mk to optimize for speed.
	madplay:	mp3 player using the libmad & libid3tag libraries, added config.in & madplay.mk to build under buildroot.
	uClibc:	glibc replacement library, no modifications, but the configuration needs to be changed after the initial build to enable locale support. This is in support of weechat, and other ncurses based programs.

The following two applications are not built under buildroot, but use the tools built by buildroot. In all cases you will have to adapt the "config-xxxx-arm-linux" wrapper for your own directory structure.
	freebase:	This is a simple streaming audio application that uses the libmad mp3 decoder library. In its original form, freebase had some serious problems, this is my attempt to fix them. The original code was not under development, but this is not a fork, just an adaptation for the Zipit. The copyright remains with the original owner.
	weechat:	This is an IRC client that supports an ncurses interface. It works acceptably on the Zipit. I made no changes to the code, as it is being actively developed. I added a wrapper for configure that adapts it to the cross/arm environment created by buildroot.


Kernel:		This folder contains patches to the linux 2.4.21 kernel neccessary to recreate the kernel in zimage.dat. The rmk-1 patch is not provided, nor is the kernel souirce due to space considerations. The zipit patch is provided for convinence, and must be applied befor the km4 patch. The km4 patch includes the framebuffer, keyboard, audio and mixer drivers that were developed for the Zipit. They are all derivations of prior GPL'd work and retain that license as well as their original and my copyrights.
 This kernel is to be compiled with arm-linux-gcc 3.3.3.


 The mp3 players included are intended to demonstrate that playing mp3's and doing streaming audio on the Zipit is possible. They still have some issues with data rates, and skipping. The only way those problems will be solved is by having more eyes look at the code and better minds than mine thinking about those problems. 

The audio drivers are built as modules and must be loaded prior to using the sound system.