$38 Zipit Wireless Messenger receives Linux injection, becomes $38 netbook

Poor Zipit. As a $149.99 instant messenger client nobody got particularly excited about you. Even now, as a $38 IM client you aren’t exactly in high demand — but as a $38 portable Linux machine, well, that’s another story altogether. The machines have been tweaked before, but the latest and greatest is this hack from Hunter Davis, who can turn a virgin Zipit Z2 into a full-featured Linux machine in under five minutes, as shown in the video below. To do the same all you need is Hunter’s hacked firmware and a microSD card to throw it onto. Once completely tweaked you’ll get full mouse support, WiFi connectivity, and even audio output so that you can rock some tunes on the go — though the command-line interface won’t make it the most compelling PMP ever. With only a 300MHz processor and 32MB of RAM we wouldn’t go compiling our COMP-SCI 101 homework on here, but this little firmware refresh certainly makes for a tastier experience than before.

[Via lilputing]

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$38 Zipit Wireless Messenger receives Linux injection, becomes $38 netbook originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This post is tagged: firmware, hack, Im, Instant Messaging, Instant messenger, InstantMessaging, InstantMessenger, Linux, PMP, zipit, zipit z2, ZipitZ2