We should soon have the official wiki page updated to properly mention that the European Rockbox Devcon 2008 will be in Berlin June 28-29th. The exact address being
the HQ of VAMED Deutschland (www.vamed.de)
Schicklerstr. 5-7, D-10179 Berlin
I certainly am gonna go there and I hope as many as possible of all Rockbox hackers will too, at least you who live on this continent.
There’s also a Devcon West 2008 planned, due to be sometime after the summer around the US west coast or something. Personally, I hope to be able to go to that too, but we’ll see how things look later on when they have a fixed time and location.
A lot of people have asked me about my opinions on and comparisons between these babies, the Cowon D2 and the Meizu M6, and here’s my take. Of course a lot of this involves the original firmwares’ functionalities as that’s what I’ve been using on them so far. The Rockbox port for the D2 is progressing at great speed but isn’t yet capable of producing sound, and the Meizu port still has a long way to go (since it’s still in its infancy with research and reverse engineering being the primary doings atm).
Cowon D2
Touch screen isn’t really the best idea for a portable media player I’d say, but I must confess that the UI with “pop-up” buttons is rather nifty. See this little video for a grasp on how it works:
I haven’t used it a lot but the UI is working nicely and is fairly easy to use. I haven’t yet got myself an SD card to insert and try out, but I should soon! It does have visible tiny little screws that shows it could be disassembled quite possibly without too much efforts. Some of my other Rockbox friends are interested in the D2 quite a lot because it comes in a DAB model too, but my version is limited to FM radio only and even
Meizu M6
Next to the D2 this baby feels extremely small. It also has no visible screws or anything that reveals how it could be disassembled! The bootup procedure is first a bit silly since you need to hold down the PLAY key for a while but it doesn’t actually start until you release it, and you don’t know exactly how long you need to hold it. But then I think it proceeds nicely with the screen not even showing that it started, apart from a little “Loading…” text.
The M6 doesn’t use a touch screen but instead they have a “weirdo” slider pad with four button areas. Most of everything in the UI that goes up and down, like moving in menus, changing values, changing volume etc is done by letting a finger slide on the pad. This could’ve been a nice way of input if it wasn’t far too sensitive and thus I always seem to miss my goal menu item and have to go up and down several times before I manage to “hit” my target. Quite annoying!
Of course one downside with this player that isn’t a surprise at all but can be stressed, is the lack of any expansion slot so the original 8GB I got is all this unit is ever gonna see.
Conclusion
I think I end up liking the D2 somewhat more, mostly because of the slider on the M6 being annoying and that the D2 is expandable. The D2 also has a nicer OF (original firmware), but that’s not really what I care about since I plan to run Rockbox on both. Unfortunately I’ve not had a lot of spare time for actually getting into the hacking recently so right now I can’t comment on that much. I’ve seen interesting progress done by others in the mean time though!
I cannot say that the D2 is twice as good as the M6 so I’d actually say that M6 is a better value purchase.
Ok, that’s it for now. These are my first impressions, I’ll try to come up with some further ones later on after some more usage and hopefully some real rockboxing on them
I hadn’t gotten myself a new DAP in ages, and the last time I got one I had it donated to me from SanDisk. So it was really due time to get back into low-level fighting with Rockbox ports again. I ordered myself an 8GB Meizu M6 (SL) and a 8GB Cowon D2 (DAB-less), since both are very interesting flash-based targets with two very promising early Rockbox-porting efforts and we have data sheets for the SoCs used in both of them ( Samsung SA58700 and Telechips TCC7801).
I decided I should dive right in and also be able to do some nice comparisons of both these targets as they are quite similar spec-wise. Both units arrived at my place at the same time, so I got the chance to get a feel for them at once without any discrimination against either one.
Some first impressions without even having switched any of them on:
The M6 comes in a much smaller box indicating it’s “mini player” style already there. It was also much cheaper, almost half the price of the D2.
The D2 comes with a wall-charger but otherwise both boxes include earplugs, a driver-cd (windows stuff I presume) and a USB cable.
Comparing their physical appearances next to each other, there’s no doubt that the M6 is much smaller (even perhaps amazingly small – but yet with a screen that is considerably larger then for instance my Sansa e200) and I can’t help think that the D2 design is a bit weird has it looks as if it has something that can slide out but it doesn’t. I assume some of the D2’s extra size (thickness) is due to its SD slot (yes that’s full size SD not microSD) which is something the M6 doesn’t feature, not even a micro version. Both have USB mini-B slots and charges over that. The D2 has a small protective cover over the slot.
I’ll provide more fluff like photos comparing them against each other and against other targets soon as well, and perhaps something about how their firmware compares, the status of Rockbox on them etc. Stay tuned!
With an unfortunate Sourceforgeregistry date of April 1st 2008, it could very well be an April’s fools prank but then I can’t see any real reasons why someone couldn’t port ipodlinux over to the Sansa e200 v1 series.
So Sansalinux is working according to their site, and they also provide some crappy screenshots that aren’t really good enough to make it possible to tell if they are for real or fakes.
The uclinux patch on their download page seems genuine and contains a lot of code originating from Rockbox (including copyright lines from Rockbox hackers).
As in the case with the ipod version, it begs the question what they want with this apart from the fun of getting Linux on yet another target. Also, seeing how there’s really no developers around to hack on ipodlinux it’ll be interesting to see if there will be any on the Sansa version. Seeing that it doesn’t run on the v2 version (no surprise really since Rockbox doesn’t either) so there’s no new Sansa e200 to buy to run this linux on.
If someone actually tries this out, please let us know what you find out!
On the gsoc mentors list one of the Google admins brought up the suggestion that the application period should be extended another week to allow students somewhat longer time to apply. This caused a flood of responses from many organizations and a lot of them (although not all) told stories that we share in the Rockbox project: at this time (with only some 13 hours left until the deadline) we have less applications than last year and they also seem to be of lesser quality. At the time of me writing this there have been no verdict if the period will be extended or not. Of course voices have been raised against the idea as well citing well-argued reasons such as the students who did manage to apply before the deadline might be less favored by an extension and that it will affect the time line in general etc.
In the #rockbox IRC channel we figured out that the total sum a gsoc student gets (4500 USD) has gone down quite considerably to a European student as last year’s students got about 3500 Euros but the same amount of USD is currently worth not more than about 2800 Euros. And remember that this is payment for a supposedly full-time work during twelve weeks. Ok they’re students and everything ,but still… and this 700 Euro drop (ok since currencies fluctuates it may be more or less at the end of the summer) may in fact be a contributing factor why less students apply.
A lot of poeple also suggested that having the application period over the easter period might’ve hampered this as well, as easter time is holiday time in many countries all over the glob.
And since we know the e200v2 one is an AS3525, there is little doubt that the Fuze one is as well. Of course we can confirm this for real once we get our hands on a firmware update file for the Fuze – I’m not aware of the existence of any yet at least.
Update: because some less intelligent people decided that facts I wrote in this article back in 2008 would still be the truth several years later, I urge you all you check the date for things your read on the internets. And in this particular case, Rockbox runs very good these days on several SanDisk players that use the AMS chipsets. See the http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SansaAMS page for details
I listened to lugradio’sseason 5 epsisode 14 podcast today and I thought I’d share that at roughly 1:20 into the show there’s a brief mentioning and discussion around Rockbox. The subject came up thanks to a listener’s email explaining how he got his Sansa e200 player to play ogg by installing it.
Unintentionally, it was also quite ironical how Adam (one of the podcast hosts) just minutes before this mentioned how he has an iAudio X5 that can play ogg vorbis (and flac) natively (as a response to a user asking what players the guys would recommend) – without mentioning a single word about Rockbox even though Rockbox worked on the X5 long before it worked on the Sansa and I would think that any Linux- liking Open Source geek should know about Rockbox and use it on their mp3 players at least as long as they have targets that Rockbox is already ported to and working fine on… and when asked, I can only recommend getting any player that can run Rockbox before one that can’t. Of course these days this is somewhat of a dilemma since none of the players Rockbox supports are manufactured anymore…
I also liked in a elbow-poking sort of way how they referred to the ipodlinux project as one of the most pointless projects in existence. Of course, that may very well also be one of the reasons why that project is now more or less dead. This also makes me think of this lwn.net post by debacle, who argues that having Linux on a portable music player is better than Rockbox simply because “there’s where the developers are”. As the ipodlinux example shows, the reality is not that simple.
As probably one of the last humans on earth, I got my paper version of Linux Journal’s April 2008 issue in my mailbox today. While I’ve felt that the magazine has slowly degraded over the last years, this issue certainly made me all warm and fuzzy inside since it contains not one but two articles on subjects very dear to me. A three-page article was dedicated to a Rockbox review (subscription-required-to-read link) named “iPod + Rockbox = Entertainment Extravaganza” and there was a two-page article on how to use curl (another paid-subscription-required link)to fiddle with a web interface named “Twittering from the Command Line”.
I have a hard time to put a finger on exactly why I feel that the magazine has lost some of its past qualities but I’ve noticed that I finish the magazine much faster these days and I generally skip over more uninteresting articles. I haven’t really investigated this, but it may very well be because a shift in focus in the magazine. I tend to be interested in low-level, kernel, OS, hardware-touching, libraries and related stuff. Not so much in high-level applications or web frameworks and more user and desktop oriented fluff.
I should also add that the Rockbox review was pretty good. Not perfect in any way since it contained errors, was for an old boring grayscale-ipod target and suggested that the original OS is better suited for playing music… The article that mentioned curl wasn’t really about curl but only showed how it can be used but it was mentioned in positive terms at least!
On the web, it seems more or less everything is eventually getting out and gets accessible for people to download and see. You can fight hard and make a real effort but as we keep seeing, lots of secrets get revealed in the end anyway.
The other day a friendly fellow joined the Rockbox IRC channel and pointed out a russian site full of iriver goodies such as service manuals, firmwares and perhaps most importantly: circuit diagrams for just about all (somewhat older) iriver models, including the H10, H100, H300 series and more.
I wish we had these before when the Rockbox ports for these targets were younger, but I’m sure they’ll still come handy to some people now as well.
(Now I won’t reproduce the link here just to not make the traffic too hard on that site and to avoid getting into problems for linking to content that is clearly dubious legal-wise, but you don’t have to be a genius to find the link yourself.)
considerably to a European student as last year’s students got about 3500 Euros but the same amount of USD is currently worth not more than about 2800 Euros. And remember that this is payment for a supposedly full-time work during twelve weeks. Ok they’re students and everything ,but still… and this 700 Euro drop (ok since currencies fluctuates it may be more or less at the end of the summer) may in fact be a contributing factor why less students apply.
