Installed Rockbox
Last night I finally got around to installing Rockbox on my iPod. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while now, as I’m trying to transition to as many open source alternatives as possible*. Anyway, it wasn’t too much hassle, though it did end up taking a bit more time than I thought it should, and I did run into a few snags.
So I went to Rockbox’s website and went to the documentation for my 30gb iPod Video. Reading through the instructions, I thought it would be simple enough, so I decided to try the automated installer (rbutilqt) rather than the manual install.
So I download rbutilqt, throw it in a folder, then I run it. The user interface was very nice. I select the autodetect button and it detects my iPod. So far so good. Then I click on the complete install and I get the nice BOOM “No iPod could be found” error message. Excellent. Except for the fact that it was autodetected and I was able to drag and drop songs to and from it in RhythmBox. Looking again at the manual, I go the check out the manual route. I download the bootloader and run it. Bam, once again, nothing. Nice “No iPod could be found” error again.
So then I thought about permissions. I go throw rbutilqt into my $HOME directory and chmod +x it.
$ chmod +x rbutilqt
Run the program again, this time using sudo and had no problems detecting and installing. So now I have Rockbox on my iPod and I can play .ogg files to my heart’s content (as well as playing Doom).
Question for all the *nux gurus out there: Why could I easily transfer files to and from the iPod in RhythmBox but the autoloader wouldn’t detect it (without running as root)? I would think that they’re the same user, so it shouldn’t matter either way.
Note: if I had the money, then my main computer would probably be a 15” Macbook Pro. But I don’t, so it’s not. Instead, I’m currently running Ubuntu 8.04 (which, so far, has been awesome).