Slashdot Mirror

Mod parent way, way down. It's like I walked into the Steve Ballmer Reality Distortion Field.

Plus since 99.9% of the rest of the world still uses .doc format government and everyone else will still have to use MS Office & MS Windows.

What is so evil about this well-crafted statement is it manipulates the reader by doing the "everyone uses it" argument. When your Mom said, "If everyone you knew wanted to jump off a cliff, then I suppose you would jump too." when you wanted to do something justified by referring to your friend's activities. Maintaining closed standards is harmful, like jumping off a cliff.

The truth is everyone doesn't use it. Look at the standard document format in the American legal system. Most documents published on the web are in PDF and there's a Free (as in speech) pdf generator for every platform. Even windows. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

ODF is a great idea. But it is only a tiny step away from propriatary formats.

This statement is materially false. No patent encumbrances, no license encumbrances, no distribution encumbrances, and an API that a programmer can _actually_ use. versus Microsoft's API which should win an award for documents that say nothing.

Microsoft harms everyone who uses a computer by defending their closed document formats. Congratulations, you've blown the truthiness meter up.

For Windows installers, I like WiX. It's open-source (CPL), yet made by Microsoft and used to package Microsoft software (e.g. SQL server, Office 2007). It also compiles to standard .MSI (or MSI-based .EXE) files, instead of relying on all custom code like some installers do.

My emulator, KEGS, does a reasonable job at double-hires as well, and it doesn't look all blurry:

http://kegs.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

Except for the fact that you're completely wrong, you have a point. Just because the acronym has been "deprecated" doesn't mean that it's not how it started.

I don't care if it stands for "Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder".

It doesn't. From the LAME website:

LAME is an MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder licensed under the LGPL.

Give galculator a shot. http://galculator.sourceforge.net/

If you use Nautilus (GNOME desktop file browser) or the KDE equivalent you can connect to remote servers graphically using SSH, WebDAV, whatever protocol you like if you find the command line not pretty enough. No need to open a terminal Nautilus->File->Connect to server->SSH

--Remote Desktop: Check. Not as slick as the Windows one, but doesn't lack for anything important.

Are you talking about Vino or Vncviewer or what? In what way is there slickness lacking?

example of where it doesn't is media production. The tools for Linux are sub par at best in my experience. In theory it might be possible to do what I need, but in practice I have never been able to figure out how and it is just too much effort. For Windows I just install Sony Vegas and go,

What do you do with Sony Vegas? I've never used it. Looking at it's bumf it looks like Audacity does a similar job. I hasten to add I don't do much besides basic chopping out segments of recordings for podcasts, fade-in/out at the edges of those segments and some adjustment of sound levels.

As far as the texteditors go I think they're one of the strongpoints of GNU/Linux. You might like JEdit

I had some problems with memory invasion and leaking in a game that I'm working. At that time I coded MemDebug.
Its a pretty much simple memory debugger, detect leaks and comes with a pointer wrapper that detects memory invasion.

You can get it here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/memdebug

Templates aren't readable?

O'RLY?
http://alliance.cvs.sourceforge.net/alliance/trade routes/code/core/opstack.h?revision=1.1&view=marku p
http://alliance.cvs.sourceforge.net/alliance/trade routes/code/core/oplinkedlist.h?revision=1.1&view= markup
http://alliance.cvs.sourceforge.net/alliance/trade routes/code/core/fe_dbl_linked_list.h?revision=1.2 &view=markup

(before you ask: yes i have a vendetta against the STL sometimes... i like to be able to use Watch effectively for debugging and that wasn't possible w/ STL in MSVC6... in MSVC8 it's much better)

Templates aren't readable?

O'RLY?
http://alliance.cvs.sourceforge.net/alliance/trade routes/code/core/opstack.h?revision=1.1&view=marku p
http://alliance.cvs.sourceforge.net/alliance/trade routes/code/core/oplinkedlist.h?revision=1.1&view= markup
http://alliance.cvs.sourceforge.net/alliance/trade routes/code/core/fe_dbl_linked_list.h?revision=1.2 &view=markup

(before you ask: yes i have a vendetta against the STL sometimes... i like to be able to use Watch effectively for debugging and that wasn't possible w/ STL in MSVC6... in MSVC8 it's much better)

Templates aren't readable?

O'RLY?
http://alliance.cvs.sourceforge.net/alliance/trade routes/code/core/opstack.h?revision=1.1&view=marku p
http://alliance.cvs.sourceforge.net/alliance/trade routes/code/core/oplinkedlist.h?revision=1.1&view= markup
http://alliance.cvs.sourceforge.net/alliance/trade routes/code/core/fe_dbl_linked_list.h?revision=1.2 &view=markup

(before you ask: yes i have a vendetta against the STL sometimes... i like to be able to use Watch effectively for debugging and that wasn't possible w/ STL in MSVC6... in MSVC8 it's much better)

I think the real question to ask is do you write real programs? That guy was just explaining to you why he uses boost and all you can do is retaliate because you don't understand some simple C++ concepts. If you don't know what RAII is, you shouldn't be coding C++ it's vitally important in writing resource and exception safe programming.

Perhaps these links will help you:

RAII
SWIG
MVC
LOKI Library

I haven't used it for a while, but I used to use Bruce Peren's efence for bits of malloc debugging, it hasn't been actively developed for ages but it's pretty light weight if that's what you need. There appears to be an up to date branch DUMA which I haven't tried. As far as I remember you can use efence under WIN and DUMA claims to work......

Unfortunately, what you prolly want is valgrind or purify.

OS X uses CUPS too you know.

You could've just gotten Gimp.app -- which only requires X11.app be installed -- no other rigmarole necessary. Hell, it's linked off the first page you get by Googling for "Gimp Mac OS X" and it's the third link overall that Google comes up with.

Well, that's a very good question. I'm speculating here. My speculation is that you'll be seeing plenty of Atmels' AT90CAN128's in the future. But I would grant that so far they're still too new to be found in junked cars. But my point still stands because these guys are going out in mass quantities. It's a little early to be seeing them in the junkyards, but they'll end up there eventually.

      And since you're still checking on this thread, let me get your opinion on this article. I read this when it came out in '03 and it was partly where I developed my idea that ethernet was inappropriate for microcontroller networks. Would you disagree with what the author says here, or do you think maybe the disadvantages are being overplayed?

ttp://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID =13000304

        And you might find this interesting as well. I should have posted it earlier. It's about a project to use CAN in home automation hosted at Sourceforge.

http://caraca.sourceforge.net/

      Seriously, let me know your opinions. I won't be a dick again. That was out of character and I really do feel bad if I upset Apuku up there. He's clearly a pro and I'm just a freak with a lot of diverse interests repeating what I heard elsewhere. Although, if Apuku does ever look back on this thread I have to say one more thing to him.

NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!

Well, this is because all-in-one devices are almost universally shit. They're an example of cut-rate hardware/software engineering. They almost always tend to use proprietary interfacing schemes, making them inseparable from their Windows drivers, and usually the drivers are genuine turd piles anyway. The world would be a better place if they just went away.

Most (all?) of the current HP all-in-ones are fairly easy to set up with either Mac OS X (with the included driver CD) or Linux (with hplip). Mine is fully functional with both.

It's just that the free software that I did find for the most common tasks - word processing and graphics editing, were buggy and too unstable to be used

Seashore (http://seashore.sourceforge.net/) is based on GIMP, and has a native MacOSX interface. It's not Photoshop, of course, but it's still quite useable.

Check out Smultron.

And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design.

Wow. Um, better than FrontPage? I seriously hope that was a slip, and that you meant "DreamWeaver" and aren't trying to teach people web design with FrontPage - anyone who uses FrontPage and claims to be a "professional" anything to do with web design needs to be taken out into the streets and heckled to death.

As for DreamWeaver, while it does provide some nice tools for visualizing what you're doing while you do it, you really don't learn it any faster than if you were typing your data in with a text editor and saving/browser reloading frequently. There are a few good text editors out there that do syntax highlighting, for example Notepad++, and Crimson Editor. Both of which are useful for not only HTML editing, but for many other programming languages, as they change syntax highlighting based on the file extension (for HTML, PHP, Java, C, and so on...)

You could try Open Office, it's an Open Source alternative to grapics-editing/word-processing. The Gimp is a powerful little graphics editor that FP notes will do CMYK. You can also check out audacity for audio editing.

Note: these afromentioned products are usually considered mediocre by some, but the good things are that these products are not owned by a vendor-lockin, DRM entrenched, royalty grubbing, patent whoring, corporation. They are freely available, free to copy, free to use, and free to be developed by anyone in the world. You can even write, or contribute to, the code yourself if you are so inclined. A model based on worldwide collaboration is simply better than one developed behind closed windows.

The management and pricing systems of proprietary software is unprincipled. The ethics and
support methods are abhorrent, un-reliable and un-reasonable. The entire system reeks of snake-oil. These things may not be relavant to you, and I would complain some more, but I've run out of retorts. If you don't like what I've said, maybe go do a bittorrent search for porn and your mom. It's there, trust me.

I teach Website Development at a TAFE and I have found Notpad++ to be pretty good. It is still a simple text editor, but it's free and it colour-codes your text (useful for finding those unclosed tags or quotation marks).

Dreamweaver does more, but it depends greatly what you are doing. I use Dreamweaver a lot, but I spend nearly all my time in code view anyway. The only major problem I have with Dreamweaver is it's inability to handle frames properly. but frankly, no WYSIWYG editor does. You're better off setting frames and framesets in text editors anyway, if you are using them at all.

Who can live without that!.

If you want to be able to expand your raid, one option (if you are at familiar with Linux is to use EVMS http://evms.sourceforge.net/ as it allows you to expand on your existing raid system, without you losing everything. The other option is to wait until Windows Home Server comes out which although isn't raid 5, in fact its more like raid 1, although not exactly like it, it will still allow you to have redundant expandable storage, and probably a lot less riskier than EVMS (cos if something does go wrong you may well lose your raid, and will have to rebuild it from scratch which won't be fun.)

It'll take some reading and combining from multiple sources. I've been doing it for a few years, combined with a handful of upgrades, plus setting it up as an iSCSI backend- all of that lent to the pool of greyness in my head.

I recommend Gentoo to do this with. Other distro's dont include the latest mdadmtools required to manage and migrate RAID5 md devices. Ubuntu is catching up, I believe.

Here are some places to start:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_Install_on_Sof tware_RAID
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86+raid+lvm2- quickinstall.xml
http://linas.org/linux/Software-RAID/Software-RAID .html
http://linas.org/linux/raid.html
http://evms.sourceforge.net/
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

Unfortunately wrap, htmlization and all that marlaky is a general problem when it comes to signing via web interfaces, be it gmail or some generic php webforum. I came across the same issue when I made a few comments in relation to the now stillborn EnigWeb project.

Perhaps it's time for a GPG-wide standard for 'verification-lite', aimed at web-traffic. The idea being to trade a small amount of security for method robustness. Rather than signing a bit-for-bit copy, sign a version where anything other than the main visible characters are ignored. New lines, carriage returns, tabs, multiple consecutive spaces, rare symbols that might by mangled by php scripts: all are ignored. So rather singing:

The cat sat on
the mat.

, you sign instead: 'Thecatsatonthemat.'.

Obviously, greater minds than mine need to sit down and assess the pros, cons and risks (more freedom to try and create collisions), but it strikes me as an idea worth considering.

• Etiher Pidgin Encrypt (formely Gaim Encryption)
• Or OTR

I can't speak about the rest, but I can overcome #1 rather quickly with a couple of free options:

CutePDF - The basic version is free as in beer; I've used this quite successfully on Office 2000-2003 documents, as well as Visio diagrams. It creates a virtual printer that you print your document to.

PDFCreator - A quick Google search found this Sourceforge project that is GPL'd and was at least reasonably active last year. I've never tried it, but it appears the concept is similar to CutePDF.

Keep in mind that both of these products can print just about anything, including Office documents. Also, as for #3, it's my understanding that Office has a number of collaboration tools specifically to address situations like this, at least from Office 2003 and on. I haven't had the pleasure of working with them, so I'm not entirely sure how well they work. I have used Google Docs and it has a rather nifty collaboration package, however, that seems to mimic the functionality you're describing, with the ability to roll back to previous versions of a document and the like.

For the Mac users out there BibDesk is fantastic.

http://tivodecode.sourceforge.net/

Your logic for ODF is a "lame duck open source clone" is needs more justification.

I wasn't talking about ODF specifically, I was talking about OpenOffice - the file format is pretty much irrelevant. OpenOffice, NeoOffice, StarOffice and all these other free, open-source office clones are still buying in to the paradigm they have inherited from Microsoft - namely, WYSIWYG presentation-based markup. I reject that. As a writer, I do not want to markup "this is italic" or "this is 16pt bold" or whatnot, I want to markup "this is a heading, this is a paragraph etc." For me, whether it's got 1in margins or 2in is irrelevant. The design of OpenOffice is one which puts forward that WYSIWYG paradigm. I don't think in 'pages' or 'character spacing' or 'margins', I think in ideas and how they relate and are organised.

So how do you specify your "XML-based format" if you don't use ODF or OOXML?

Simple. I use an XML-based format that's not ODF or OOXML. Have you seen the size of the OOXML specification? It's like 900 pages long stretched across three different namespaces and Microsoft chose XSD as their schema langauge, even though something like RELAX NG would have been a *lot* saner.

What actual format I use is something I have yet to decide - I've tried DocBook but found it too heavy, and TEI is a little bit too backwards-facing (it's designed for archivists and librarians, it seems). XHTML is kind of light enough for my uses, but there's no good XHTML->FO stylesheets that I've seen, so you are reliant on browsers for turning it in to a PDF.

I may simply specify my own format using a RELAX NG schema and use that. That way, how I write will be determined by me, not by Bill Gates. The XML stack is quite an attractive proposition for me because it's de-facto open - RNG schema, XSL and FO are all viewable, and the document is just text with some extra guff added. Plus it's really, really well internationalized, which is something other data formats struggle with. I can also 'pull-in' other formats like MathML or XForms and embed them within my format.

I feel the same about office software quite generally - it feels inefficient to use it. For instance, I never use spreadsheets. If I have data that needs processing, I'll pop open a terminal window and write a Python script. I have control over the data that is being processed and what happens with it. If I need a graph, I'll type 'import matplotlib' and make one. If the data is not merely temporary, I'll put it up on the web as some kind of data file that others can reuse. That data file will have semantic value of some kind (the elements and attributes will describe where it means rather than just where it is on an Excel grid).

If I need to give a presentation, I'll use Eric Meyer's S5 and a generator script that makes it work with an open source outliner I use. Databases? MySQL (or eXist). The 'office' paradigm does nothing for me, and it's something to be actively worked around. I have access to both Office and OpenOffice on both the Mac and on Linux and I *never* use them. The home-grown ways are just so much more efficient for me.

Now, some idiot is going to say "but you can't expect everyone to just drop Word and Excel and use Python and/or XSL". That may be so. But for me, I'm not going to waste my life working with bad software. If the software I am using sucks, I *will* write my own to replace it. One size does not fit all. With regard to academics, I think that if you are intelligent enough to be splitting atoms or deconstructing 19th century poetry, you are intelligent enough to be able to use a piece of software that's not made by Microsoft. Journals should take the lead here. People actually aren't stupid - almost everyone, however they may fail in school, usually gets a driver's license - because there's an economic motivation to having a driver's lice

Its been over a year so I don't remember the details of GIT, but I remember having to do a lot of things "twice". Need to do a checkout? Two commands. Need to commit? Two commands. It was a bitch to use and I am glad I'm done with it. SVN, on the other hand, I felt very comfortable with from the start

mtn pull
mtn update

mtn commit
mtn push

One system that I have looked at is PlutoHome http://plutohome.com/index.php

They can in some circumstances integrate just about everything you want for automation, Phone (Asterisk), Lighting (Insteon, X10 and others), Security, HVAC (I think), and presence based services (Music, phone calls, video follows you from room to room), TV, DVD jukebox, etc.

And if you want to install it yourself you can, or you can have it professionally installed.

For the infrastructure, go for Cat5e, and Wireless A/B/G. Fiber is overkill and doesn't appear to be coming to a desktop as a standard install anytime soon.

Conduit as others have mentioned is also a great idea... How many HD connectors have there been in the last 3 years? How about the next 10? Put in generous counduits between your video devices (TVs, Projectors, etc) and your server room/closets. (3 inch should be good)

Multi Zoned Heating/Cooling System. (If you are looking for do it yourself, Pluto has some built in, and DIY Zoning http://diy-zoning.sourceforge.net/

Depending on Cell phone converage, possibly integrate a Cell repeater in the house.

Plan for also quite a bit of COAX for satelite or Cable. 2 COAX or more per data drop, remember you can use good COAX for your Component, or digital COAX audio also.

Zoned in wall speakers with room based controls (Like A-bus or similar). For the actual home theater system I would stay away from the in wall speakers, stick to good floor standing or wall mountable speakers. For Speaker Wire check out this site before you drop major dolars on "Premium" speaker wire http://www.roger-russell.com/wire.htm.

Plan for Sound deadening your rooms. (http://www.soundproofing.org/index.html or http://www.soundisolationcompany.com/

Also consider running Data cabling where you might not think to, Washing machine, Dryer, Fridge, Stove, Microwave, Freezers. At least you can use this data cabling for alarm circuits to monitor temperatures inside your freezer and fridge to check for temperatures out a range (It sucks to come home to an upright freezer that the door didn't close and it is 95 degrees out... Say goodbuy to your Frozen Elk and Deer...) Also Aquariums for temperature and other sensors that you can feed back into your central HVAC/Security systems. Temperature sensors all over the place (check out the aforementioned DIY Zoning site)

Outlets outside under your eaves for Christmas lights.

And the list goes on.

Good luck and I hope you have some deep pockets... :)

Make your case? You're too funny. :-)

1. You don't seem to understand that one has to use POSIX to create a hole. The mere presence isn't necessarily enough.

2. Win32 is broken for the same reason that POSIX is. Lots of unchecked buffers all over creation.

3. He finally gets it! Yes, Java and other high-level languages provide "secure execution environments with no direct access to memory".

4. The Java environment pushes the Unix system out of the way. If you're going to write everything in Java, there's no real need for Unix other than as a host system. JNode (while still a Work in Progress) is an example of how Java can be its own OS.

5. Having a perfect execution environment like Java or .Net doesn't help if the underlying libraries are not secured. An attacker can simply pass through the attack to the lower levels. This sort of exploit has happened to Java a couple of times, and has probably happened to .Net. (Though I haven't kept up on that as much.)

6. XNU isn't Mach. NeXT and Apple removed many of the performance issues by removing most of the true microkernel advantages. Thus it is now described as a "hybrid kernel". Thus "Apple made lemonade." Not exactly a glowing recommendation for kernel writers to change their structure. If you had actually read the internals book you posted, you'd know that.

7. Make drove me crazy? No. The GNU Build system does. Almost every time I try to compile someone else's software. While solutions like Autoconf and pkgconfig are good tries, they collapse under their own complexity. You can learn more about the fun I have with the GNU Build system in my journal entry on Mono: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234131

8. Neither Make nor Ant are "modules" of the operating system. They're usermode programs, genius.

9. Ant works well because it targets a sane environment. Java in specific. (Though I have heard of people using it for other tasks.) POSIX systems are nowhere near that sane, thus why the build system fails so often.

10. Search built into the filesystem. Apple hasn't done too badly, and BeOS did exceptionally well. Not that I'd expect you to know about such a system as BeOS. It wasn't Unix.

11. Funny thing, I wasn't aware that Google developed Google Desktop on Unix. Wait, they didn't. They did port it to Mac OS X, but that's got more to do with IOKit and the underlying Spotlight tools than Unix.

12. Love the insults. Really do. They're so... crass. They suit you well.

I use the program gnomad2 to transfer tracks to my Creative Zen which also uses MTP.
You need the libmtp library from here: http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/
And gnomad2 from here: http://gnomad2.sourceforge.net/

Gnomad2 isnt the greatest app ever written but it seems to do the job and is relatively easy to use.

I believe there is also a kio slave for mtp out there somewhere which might be easier, but I haven't used it myself.

I use the program gnomad2 to transfer tracks to my Creative Zen which also uses MTP.
You need the libmtp library from here: http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/
And gnomad2 from here: http://gnomad2.sourceforge.net/

Gnomad2 isnt the greatest app ever written but it seems to do the job and is relatively easy to use.

I believe there is also a kio slave for mtp out there somewhere which might be easier, but I haven't used it myself.

I live in Australia, OGGs play fine on my UMS-based E10. I have had problems running some AVI's (although most work ok).

I bought my E10 mainly because it was about the most Linux-friendly device I could find that had the features I wanted at a reasonable price and reputation for quality. PMPlib allows you to rebuild the device's media index, iriverter (a gui front-end for Mencoder) produces the appropriate video format for the device. Being UMS-based, it doubles as a USB drive for copying files around. I even store scripts on it that I run to rsync files to it, call PMPlib/Mencoder, etc. I'm very happy with my little E10.

Rockbox doesn't support the E10, so that's not an option for me (yet).

Disclaimer: I have no links whatsoever with iRiver, other than being a satisfied customer.

Lossless would be more useful in the future—I might want to archive the recordings in a format I know I'll be able to play/transcode to something else later on (FLAC is ideal for this).

As for Apple's new offering, I wouldn't pay 3x for a difference that I personally would only maybe be able to detect in a back-to-back comparison that will never happen.

You're not just paying more for something you might not hear, you're also paying more for embedding personal data in the track. According to ArsTechnica Apple embeds customer information in the DRM-free tracks too. Customers didn't get that when they bought wax cylinders, records, or tapes, nor do customers get that when they buy CDs. Customers can easily resell all of the older media without divulging personal information (theirs or anyone else's). I doubt most people leveraging their first-sale right by selling their iTunes tracks want to distribute anyone's personal information along with it. But maybe Apple has this covered: as George Hotelling learned, it's harder to sell one's iTunes tracks than it needs to be.

And now it appears that the new iTunes version will not let you "convert the music you've bought -- even "DRM-free" songs sold at a 30 percent premium -- into MP3s that will play on your iPod" when you rip the CD with iTunes. I believe most MacOS X users manage their audio tracks exclusively with iTunes from ripping and uploading to a portable digital audio device, to searching and playback. I could do the same thing with Rhythmbox on a free software OS (minus the digital restrictions management and personal data embedding, of course) if I weren't so finicky about processing the ripped WAV file with other programs before I encode with FLAC.

I had a similar problem with the Creative Zen V (4GB). I grabbed the libmtp stuff from http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/ and can copy files over via the command line. mtp-sendtr works to send a track over to the player. I haven't had much luck getting Amarok to work with libmtp though. I recompiled it with what I thought were the proper options but no luck. My wife has an iPod and either Amarok or Rhythmbox works great for it. A little trouble with playlists in Rhythmbox, but otherwise it's fine. D.

I just got my girlfriend a 12GB iriver X20 for her birthday. There's a menu setting which allows you to select the connection behaviour - whether it acts like a USB drive, or be compatible with WMP. Then, just drag & drop the mp3s/oggs. It even has a microSD slot, which I haven't played with yet.

I have a 20GB iriver H10, which requires me to hold a button in while switching it on to put it into "Emergency Mode" so it appears as a USB drive. Prior to installing Rockbox, I then had to run easyH10 to build the database. Now, I just drag and drop - Rockbox builds the DB for me.

Back in the day, I had an iriver iFP-120. iriver provided a firmware on their website which, when installed, caused the player to act like a USB drive.

So, the H10 is the least Linux-friendly, and even that's not so bad! They're functional, durable, cheap & attractive little players.

I can't believe no one's mentioned USBsink.

http://usbsink.sourceforge.net/
A program for automatic file synchronization over USB.

USBSink is a GNOME program for automatic file synchronization over USB. It is designed for users of removable drives, such as flash drives or external hard disks. In USBSink you define a task associated to a particular USB drive, and then have a complete automation of data trasfers. With file monitoring and hardware detection features, the program is able to respond and act according to relevant events on the desktop.

5G iPod support stinks for me in Linux as well. I love my ability to rip any MP3s from an iPod with KDE by typing "ipod:/" and having everything sorted nicely. On the other hand, synching is terribly broken. Last night I tried using both the ipod:/ kioslave AND Amarok (which probably uses the ipod kioslave) with mostly poor results. 16GB of music was copied to my device, but only 350 of my 2500 songs "registered" on the iPod. The rest were in the appropriate folders, but the iPod stated 15GB of its data were "Other" files and could not play them.

I've found a lot of these problems are often down to a combination of wonky ID3 tags on the files and/or the libraries that read/write them, and their interpretation of the ID3 specifications. I needed to be able to both write Unicode ID3 tags containing japanese characters onto MP3 files, and have a C library capable of reading them back in. In my quest for finding both bits of software I got quite used to opening MP3 files in hex editors to examine the ID3 tags and I can tell you a lot of software falls over and does the wrong thing past the simple ASCII artist/album/trackname/... fields.

I'm pleased to say eyeD3 and libid3tag seemed to work well together.

If you've got automount running, UMS devices should just magically appear as storage when plugged in. Works fine in Suse 10.1, anyway. For MTP devices, libmtp works fine. I just got a Samsung YP-T9 and replaced the MTP firmware with UMS firmware by transferring it with mtp-sendfile from libmtp. (There's also mtpfs which is supposed to make an MTP device look like a file system. I haven't tried it, it uses FUSE (user-space filesystem) which I haven't got installed at the moment and libmtp did the job.)

On the YP-T9 after transferring, I can play the files directly from the file viewer menu, but I need to run the "update library" to get them to show up under the music menu. (The player also plays Ogg Vorbis files just fine, but the current firmware doesn't seem to recognize Ogg metadata the way it does MP3 metadata. Sigh.) The same seems to be true if I transfer files from Windows in UMS mode.

use libnjb or some use libmtp. Just stating it for the record. You can then use Gnomad2 or Amarok to manage songs, or use it as a usb drive.

use libnjb or some use libmtp. Just stating it for the record. You can then use Gnomad2 or Amarok to manage songs, or use it as a usb drive.

use libnjb or some use libmtp. Just stating it for the record. You can then use Gnomad2 or Amarok to manage songs, or use it as a usb drive.

Unless otherwise noted, projects support all iRiver iFP devices. Users have reported successfully accessing models iFP-1xx,3xx,5xx,7xx,8xx,9xx and N10. We don't anticipate difficulty supporting future models.

(Note: iRiver offers 'UMS' firmware for some iFP models. Devices running UMS firmware are compatible with generic USB Mass Storage drivers, and do not need any of the drivers mentioned here.)

My experience with iRivers is a bit old (it's before there was a libmtp), but here goes.

libmtp should work, in the normal "well, it's supposed to work" sense, (as listed at http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=compa tibility) but note I've never used that model. The sparse Syncropated page doesn't say if it actually *uses* libmtp, and in fact, I can't see any mention of MTP on their website; it only mentions mass storage.

My iRiver required some incantation when turning on the device to put it into mass storage mode, I would assume this is still the case. I think you had to hold stop while turning it on, but it's been so long and it was so immediately frustrating that I've purged that experience from my brain. It could have been anything.

Since this is an Ask article... I use an iAudio X5 (http://www.cowonglobal.com/product/product_X5_fea ture.php). The mother company is Korean, so the website and docs can be a bit funny with the English at times, but otherwise it's a great product. Rockbox (http://www.rockbox.org/) is a safe firmware replacement, and it also, well, rocks. In either firmware, the device is a simple mass storage device (with no funny business other than an obnoxious adapter necessary for USB), and KDE ([insert dig on Gnome]) picks it up immediately.

For actually syncing, I'm a junkie for simplicity: I use rsync and a directory full of symlinks to the music I want.