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Petite MP3 Player Boots PCs Into Linux
An anonymous reader submits "A French company has created a teensy MP3 player that also boots PCs into Linux. The 1.7-inch diameter, half-ounce Medaillon (way smaller than an iPod) has been around for a while, but 128MB and 256MB models of the Z2 version are now supplied with Shinux, an embedded Linux distribution that includes lots of cool open source applications." The list of included apps, from AbiWord to Xchat, is pretty impressive for a device intended primarily as a music player.
Shhh you!
.... 20GB they're all the same aren't they?
128MB
Also am I the only one not impressed by their 20Hz-10Khz freq response range? Where does 90dB come from? [isn't 16-bit PCM a range of 96dB?]
etc, etc, etc.
It's just another mp3 player with some flash stuck on the back. Nuttin new here.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Looks like the MP3 player from Virgin that got discussed here.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
See this Coin-Sized MP3 Player
It also has been OEMed by Virgin Electronics and is available at Target. The only funky thing with this french OEM is that it has a Linux on it.
boots Macs into OS-X.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
...
# tightVNC remote access
# XMMS multimedia player
# xterm X console
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Am i the only one who feels that charging a mp3 player by just a computer is a bad way of doing it?
Why? My Zen recharges by USB, as does my phone when it's docked in it's cradle. That saves me 2 power adapters when I'm travelling. Heck, even my digital camera powers up via a cradle which can draw power from USB alone, and my portable hard drive draws power from a USB2 port (unless you're on a Dell Inspirion which complains that the device is sucking too much power from the port. Cheap ass dells!)
You flip the lenses up.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I would imagine it's because OGG has higher overhead than MP3 and this unit dosent have the power to decompress, but I could be wrong.
Or so it seems... From the website: Compatibilité OS : Win98/2000/XP/Me/Mac OS ( + 9.X )
Why, oh why, is this another Linux powered beast that "isn't compatiblilite" with Linux? The Zaurus has this curse, now we have another beast. It boots linux, so you'd think that it would be listed as such.
A few months back, I bought my daughter a Benq Joybee 110.
When we got the bulky box, and then opened it and this puny 2 inch thing came out, she said: "is that it?".
It has a built in Li-Ion battery, that can be charged via the USB connection.
This is a good idea, because I don't have to pay for batteries, the music player needs a PC anyway to copy MP3 files to it anyway.
Of course, the battery will die after a few years, and replacing it will be expensive, but for 99$Cdn after rebates, that is not a bad price.
Oh, and the Joybee is Linux compatible. It just appears like another drive. That was one of the criteria for buying it.
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We at Terra Soft Solutions (Yellow Dog Linux) did this with an ipod a while ago. We had intent to sell ipods partitioned with a 5gb Linux space, and the rest open for music - but Apple informed us that the drive wasn't inteded for frequent read/writes, just burst reads... and that we would probably burn the drive pretty quickly.
:)
Ah well, it woulda been cool
no comment
Look, I hate the iPod-People as much as the next guy, but let's be honest, here.
The unit you linked to is only smaller because they've put the entire display on a separate "remote" unit. That sucks. From an engineering point of view, you want to minimize all ways in which to break the thing -- having a dedicated wired-remote doubles these chances. And look at the weakest link in the chain -- the cable from the remote to the unit -- if anything happens to that cable (stretched, yanked, sliced or diced) or the plug on the end, there goes your fancy display.
Never mind that it's encased in aluminum. The cord isn't.
If they had put the display in the unit, it would be near-perfect. If they added a 1/8" optical-TOSLINK connection to either the unit itself, or the base, that would be perfect. Who wants a line-audio copy of a CD? Digital, man!
I have an iHP-140; same principle, it's a USB hard disk that just recognises mp3s, oggs, wmas and wavs that you load onto it. It's... not hard, you know. Two simple commands to keep hard-disk collection and player collection synchronised:
[me@computer]$ cp -ru /mnt/iriver/audio /home/media/audio
/home/media/music /mnt/iriver/audio
[me@computer]$ cp -ru
Yes, it's that easy. Notice the 'u' flag; that means that if cp finds a file with the same name and the same or more recent date, it won't copy. So it'll only copy across any new stuff, not the whole multi-gigabyte mass of it.
If it looks a bit difficult, you might try a script?
#!/bin/bash /mnt/iriver
/mnt/iriver/audio /home/media/audio
/home/media/music /mnt/iriver/audio
umount /mnt/iriver
mount
cp -ru
cp -ru
Call it 'update', set the executable bit and stick it on your KDE menu if you like ease-of-use that much.
Now, I do need to keep the music organised; I like /audio/artist/album/00 - Trackname.ogg, but YMMV. All the random stuff I've downloaded rather than ripped from my own CDs are in /audio/General, which is admittedly a hellish pit. That said, I let iTunes loose on my collection once. NEVER AGAIN. Dear God, the mess it made thanks to the inconsistent tagging of all that pirated stuff. I'll organise my own music, thank you very much.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.