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Linux's iPod Generation Gap
An anonymous submittor says "Today's young generation can use Linux on the desktop provided it works with their iPod. Linux on the desktop still hasn't reached that stage and has to be compatible with multimedia applications like iTunes and iPod if it has to beat Microsoft's Windows dominance on the desktop. Open source gurus at LinuxWorld discuss solutions to make Linux more consumer-friendly."
Really. It's not hard.
/dev/sdc6. Don't know why that is, but the dev said he'd put it on his TODO list.
Just emerge gnupod and make sure you compile it with the --with-ffxk-so-opti=3 directive in autoconf. That'll hose you every time. Also I recommend that you use gnutunes out of the gnxms repository; the vanilla Gentoo repos's version is hosed.
Also, my iPod only works if I mount it as
Aside from that it's pretty easy!
For more information, click here.
Nobody has heard of gtkpod? :\
We had blinking cursors and a book full of commands on how to format your 64k tape, what do todays kids want GUI's and all this ipods!
you dont have to complain because you are lazy.
User: "How do I get my iPod to run in Linux?"
Zealot: "Oh that's easy! If you have Redhat, you have to download quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin
Wait, I can access an iPod from inside Quake 3 on Linux? Sweet. Does it give you a boost? Like an extra few feet with the rocket jump?
Now all I need is an iPod.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Does anyone ever get the feeling that the search for the mecca of desktop linux is being led by an attack-macaque that watches tirelessly over an infinitely large room with an infinite number of monkeys in it, all smooshing keyboards to design that distro that just might work.
and yet they can't. what is going on with that? I think by now, we've kinda grasped the things that make a good desktop. If no-one can bring that simple magic to linux now, they never will.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
All I need is Audible.com to work under Linux and I'll never have to touch windows again.
The latest version of Amarok whoops iTunes...love it.
Yes, support for iPod on Linux is lousy to say the least. If iPod is really that important to get the younger generation on Linux, somebody should be doing something NOW. Even something commercial, I don't care. A substitute for iTunes or something that let you move tour songs and videos in and out EASILY. Alex
Linux is *not* user friendly,
Well, it's not friendly to first post trolls perhaps.
In my case I plugged in my MP3 player, it showed up on the desktop, I copied over some MP3s and they worked. Some people might have said this was because I picked an MP3 player that implimented a standard (USB bulk storage) protocol rather than one from a vendor who aims to keep everything locked up tight, but personally I think that it's just trying to make you jealous.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Hey! I thought that kind of Troll was on the list of endangered species. I'm glad to see that all that morons complaining about that so called global warming and all that crap were sooooo wrong
There is no gap between ITunes and Amarok.
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Wow, never knew there would be a post worse than the "Quake 3 on Linux" crapula.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
...with the article summary, which implies that Linux is going to have to "be compatible" with technology X in order to appeal to the masses. In point of fact, if Linux adopts that strategy it will *never* appeal to the masses, because it will always be catching up.
The only way to have significant appeal is to offer something that the masses want, that Windows can't. Hint: rock-solid security is not something the masses *want*. Yet.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Ditto here. I plug my Archos Gmini into my laptop, which is running Slackware, and I drag and drop music onto it, no problem.
No goofy drivers, no 3rd party software, no arcane commands. It just works.
Apple puts out a proprietary, defective-by-design consumer electronics product and won't port the required software to platforms other than Mac OS or Windows and it's somehow a Linux shortcoming?
???
I'm confused.
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
Why is this such a big deal, I mean linux is good for many things, and it's strength is that people take it in a million different directions at once. A desktop OS to be sucessful, can really only go in one direction. If say for instance the open source community were to decide to "force" everything to go in one direction (not saying this is possible) then linux would no longer be linux, so to speak. Point is, linux is good for somethings and not others...besides we have windows and OSX for the desktop, isn't that enough?
Well, what do you want? Do you want to be able to throw your music on your iPod? You can do through a number of applications, although I find Amarok's new versions (>= 1.4.1) are the most seamless way to do that. I use my 4th generation 40GB iPod exclusively through Linux, and have had minor issues (had trouble getting rid of that "Do Not Disconnect" message in Mandriva/PCLinuxOS, that's about it), but no show-stoppers. As far as iTunes, I haven't tried to pull down music from the music store. I'm assuming it's not possible right now.
I find the summary deceiving. To pose the question, "does Linux work with my iPod?" and then answer "no, it hasn't reached that stage yet" is not giving a true picture. If someone asked me that question, I would say "yes, mostly" and then get them to clarify what they wanted to do.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
Funny. I click to install my linux apps. You must be talking about those debian people.
And all I had to do to get my iPod running was click 'Install support for iPod'. It did all the heavy lifting, and even put in gtkPod for me.
Mind you, it doesn't work with iTunes, but lets face it, if you're considering Linux, chances are you've already rejected the DRM-encrusted mess that is iTunes.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Why is this modded as a "Troll"? Post makes complete sense to me. I'm back to Windows XP after using Linux on the desktop for several years...heck, I first installed Linux in 1994. And yes, part of the reason is that I don't care anymore and just want to use things like my iPod without trouble.
Pretty much every media player for Linux supports the ipod. Amarok, Rhythmbox, Banshee, etc, etc. Not to mention gtkpod! AFAIK every mainstream distro compiles the proper support into the kernel for usb or firewire support as well as VFAT/HFS file system support. The ipod should be pretty much plug and play on any modern Linux distro.
At the very least the title of the article is misleading BS.
no, I don't have to complain. I don't have to use Linux, either. Want folks to use Linux? Make it less of a hassle.
Aye, and Windows is almost ready for the desktop as well:
0 33216
http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/18/2
... I use my iPod in Linux, and it's really not that big a deal. All you have to do is mount it and then run GNUPod.
The only thing that was hard to do was flash the stupid thing, other than that it's easy as hell. In fact, I had a harder time getting iTunes to work on a Windows PC than I did getting my iPod to work on my Slackware box.
Apple puts out a proprietary, defective-by-design consumer electronics product and won't port the required software to platforms other than Mac OS or Windows and it's somehow a Linux shortcoming?
And the best bit is that I (and probably you soon) got moderated down for saying it.
What do you expect Linux devs to do? Magically support every bit of hardware in existance without decent specs and no access to the closed DRM which makes the bit people are most unhappy to leave behind tick? Yes, I am aware that the actual format is open, thank you very much, but the DRM is not and so purchased large music libraries are non-trivial to convert to something that works on any platform.
And yet the iPod does work on Linux (even the new ones). How about that for good service, and all for free I might add.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
And let's see how that plan works when you have 50,000 songs.
Sure, you can carefully arrange your music into folders if you've got the time, but even then you can only have each song in one "list", unless you're willing to make multiple copies of your music for navigation purposes. Any sufficiently large music player needs an playlist/organization system, or it will be almost useless. It's not a matter of being proprietary, it's a matter of acceptably fast access to large amounts of discrete data elements. It's not as if the iPod uses some fancy data interface -- it's just a USB or FireWire disk -- it's the playlist data that needs special software.
You could argue that the organizer software should all be integrated onto the device itself; that would certainly allow you to have a dumb interface to the computer. However, it would also impose significant limitations on the complexity of the organizer software, as the user interface on the device consists of (maybe) a tiny screen and a handful of buttons instead of a standard desktop GUI.
So have fun with your "standard" device. I'll stick to one that actually lets me find the music I want.
just use SuSE 10.1, you can upload songs onto any Ipod just as easily as windows! you need banshee or Amarok but SuSE 10.1 comes with those and installs them automatically. If you want Itunes install it with Codeweavers crossover X and if you are willing to spend $500+ dollars for an Ipod you can spend $50 for this program.
Water also wet. Further bulletins at as warranted.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Well, yes. The strength of the OSS movement is that, technically, anything can be done. The fact that this has yet to be done points at a larger problem - the people who can, don't.
Say iPod support is created by this time next year. By then, the Next Cool Thing will be around. How long for Linux support for that? And the next one?
The goal posts move quickly. Linux needs more people to erm...kick balls.
Apple puts out a proprietary, defective-by-design consumer electronics product and won't port the required software to platforms other than Mac OS or Windows and it's somehow a Linux shortcoming?
It is when that's the mp3 player people want to use.
Users come first. It's just that simple.
Remember that Apple's iTunes music is encoded with its DRM. So you cannot legally play iTunes-encoded music on the iPod.
Linux will remain behind of commercial OSes in the realm of media, not because it is Linux, but becuase of DRM.
Why don't these people who complain about non-user-friendlyness just use Ubuntu. I mean, it has the Synaptic package manager with great repositories. Also, Linux DOES work with iPods. GTKpod, people.
Same here, only I got a mac.
So something like:
- Go to "Applications -> Add/Remove..."
- Select and install "Banshee"
- Then click "Applications -> Sound and Video -> Banshee"
- Plug in Ipod
- You should see your iPod on the left panel, just like in iTunes.
Is too difficult?http://ipod.hackaday.com/entry/1234000563068565/ if someone can get teh ipod to load an OS (with out DRM), we can connect an ipod to linux.
just get freespire.... install itunes via cedega..... stfu noob... *troll troll troll*
is that easy enough noob?
iTunes lets one painlessly burn, share, listen to and buy music. Many iTunes users actually use all of its features. Wake me up when a Linux app handles all of those abilities without being a bloated, buggy piece of shit.
They're Apple's users too (and they're Apple's customers).
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
Yeah. And we all know how being user friendly has allowed Apple to stomp all of their competition.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Why is this modded as a "Troll"? Post makes complete sense to me.
Funny, you must be really comfortable with accessing your iPod from Quake3 then.
The post is an known, old troll where the lazy AC only managed to replace Quake 3 with iPod in the 'questions.' If you really used Linux 'for several years' you'd have spotted the trollness of it easily - iPod access is easy both in KDE and Gnome, what's missing is iTunes (for store+iPod use)
The people who can, have. Then they turned it into a library and now iPod support is available in
- amaroK
- gPodder
- gtkpod
- iPodDisk
- podtool
- and Rhythmbox
you were saying?Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
What I don't understand is how it ever got modded insightful. You don't need opengl (or even X, for that matter) to get your ipod to work with linux. If it's sane, then it should mount like any other standard USB disk. My understanding was that every music player except for Rio's worked this way, but maybe I'm mistaken.
I have no use for an iPod. I don't walk around, needing to hear tunes all the time. I have a CD player in my car and an FM transmitter that plays MP3s from any USB-enabled device.
My job has me sitting in front of a computer all day, and I have an entire setup at home.
Additionally, I have exactly zero desire to watch video on a postage-stamp-sized screen.
And, if for some reason I DID, there's already tools available for it.
So please, all you iPod junkies, get a fucking detox.
__
Yeah, go ahead. Classify it a troll.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Alright, I'll bite. When was the last time you used Linux? Every modern distribution has some form of package management. I'm a Ubuntu user. Here are the steps I used to install GTKPod:
Now, please remind me, how is this more difficult than Windows? The same process under Windows is longer and less secure. All packages from Ubuntu's repositories are digitally signed. Can the same be said for the random executable you just downloaded from a web site?
DRM-encrusted mess?
I love music. I buy, on average, an album per week. Back in the day, it was CDs, then I gave up paying money for music and just grabbed what I wanted from Napster. Then it was a mess to find what I wanted on Gnutella or whatever, and I just stuck with what I already had.
Then iTunes came out for Windows, and I started buying my music that way.
My only complaint with the iTunes DRM in the couple of years I've used it is that when I sell/upgrade my computer, I forget to deauthorize it. Other than that, I haven't had a single problem with the songs I've purchased. Apple is as liberal as it can be with the DRM, and it doesn't hurt me in any way. As a consumer, I'm happy.
As a musician, I make far more money from iTunes downloads than I do from CD sales. Apple takes a very small cut, CD Baby takes an even smaller cut, and I end up with about 60 cents per song sold.
I understand the rights issues involved with DRM, and as general practice, I dislike it, but I fail to see how the iTunes DRM could even remotely be considered a mess.
> Linux is *not* user friendly
It actually is. It's just picky who it calls its friend, which in my opinion is a good thing.
> [...] or the installer will dump core.
I prefer this to a message box which kindly informs me that "Error -178" has happened without further details. I also once tried to get an iPod working on Windows on a friend's computer. I have very extensive Windows troubleshooting experience but after 6 hours of troubleshooting still could not figure out the problem. A reinstall mysteriously helped. Long story short, when things fail my operating system allows me to deeply trouble shoot every aspect of it. When the shit hits the fan I want to be able to open the fan to remove the mess.
:/- spoon(_).
At least on #ubuntu, experienced users/zealots usually tell users asking about how to install a specific software to use apt-get on the command line because, when giving instructions, it is the easiest way. For Ubuntu, there is the Add/Remove Programs app, which end users are supposed to use. But what is easier, telling a user to open a terminal from the menu and type in sudo apt-get install program, or telling the user to open Add/Remove Programs, type the name of the program, check the checkbox next to it, and click Install? While the latter might be the most intuitive, the former is far superior in a support situation, especially since there is little room for confusion, and the instructions are far easier to follow, even if it doesn't make sense.
.deb, double click, type in password, press Install).
Sharpmusique worked well for buying music off of Itunes the last time I tried it, and had a quite intuitive installation in Ubuntu (download
Perhaps you are using the wrong distributions? Most major linux distributions are not like Gentoo.
I have tried to cuddle up with linux and give it a shot, but i have yet to find a distro that works with my wireless card. I'm not going to use an OS that won't get me online, so stupid things like driver support for common products should be a given. Till it is, I'll have a hard time convincing myself or others to try it. That said, i know I don't use Vista because itunes breaks the glass effect when it's open (last i tried it, which was like 2 months ago), so i guess itunes is still a pretty big deal. It makes sense too, my primary use for computers is music and web.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
hmm... interesting my latest Ubunti install went kinda like this.
1. Boot with disk in drive.
2. Wait for desktop to appear
3. Double click install
4. Confirm that I really wanna toast my HD and install Ubuntu
5. Accept all default settings (ie network dhcp? yes)
6. Wait for install to finish.
7. Click on update icon in top right corner.
8. Ready to use my fully up to date Ubuntu install.
[sarcasim]Sounds very hard to me I really with I didn't have to go through all that[/sarcasim]
From your description it sounds like you haven't tried Linux since 94
Well, let's do an apples-to-apples comparison. If you buy a Thinkpad from EmperorLinux.com pre-installed with Ubuntu, then plug in an iPod, will it Just Work?
Frankly, I don't know. I suspect that as a portable music player things will go swimmingly, but there's not iTunes for Linux so you can't do the whole music purchase thing.
I use an iriver H10 20GB (the US version). By default, it is a Plays-for-Sure, WMP supported device, and you can only use WMP to copy songs over to it (there's also a plugin for Winamp, but it's somewhat buggy). However, I can also boot the device into "emergency mode" where it becomes a normal USB mass storage device. I can then copy everything over, and resync the device's database using easyH10, an opensource app that can synchronise an H10 with the content on its harddrive, and even convert .pls and .m3u playlists to the internal format used by the device.
Now, this way of copying files is not supported by iriver, and easyH10 was built using information gathered from reverse engineering the H10 database structure. IIRC, a similar model can be used with some of the other iriver devices out of the box. Either way, it's a perfect way of synching files - you copy them over, and then you let a program sort the music out. EasyH10 is available for a variety of platforms, and I use it with both my Windows desktop and Ubuntu laptop. Playlist/database syncing shouldn't be an excuse for using a closed syncing protocol that's bound to get some people locked out.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
Can't say much about the iPod, having never had one to play with, but Ubuntu is a huge improvement on the ease-of-use front. In some (note the word some before jumping on me please) ways, it is even easier than Windows. One example that shocked me is that it came with built-in drivers for my SATA controllers, whereas WinXP required me to load a driver during installation (which it would only accept on a floppy disk, mind you - annoying).
Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Well... If you use Ubuntu, you can just check off the application you want to install instead of using apt-get.
If you use Red Hat... Well... I dunno.
Personally, I use a Mac, but Ubuntu isn't that hard to use if you want to use it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
What? Get out and meet some real people. Sorry but that is cold hard truth.
My iPod mounts as a disk in Linux w/ Ghome. No, I have not tried copying MP3 files to my iPod's strange directory layout (and how it names files). I like iTunes. I like the occasional game. I like Photoshop CS2. Linux does nothing for me at home (but I'm typing from Linux at work right now).
Linux is user-friendly. It's just picky about who its friends are.
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
So when Linux becomes user friendly, its market share will drop below one percent? Careful with the pointy end of that operator.
Point two... screw it - I'm even lazier than the parent troller.
Seriously, plug in the iPod and open AmaroK.
Bring me games to Linux and Vista will go away. Unless you do that I am buying Vista and MSFT.
Time to wake up. Audio on Linux is just as bad as gaming.
/mnt. You should have been there when the rest of my family found out. Joyful memories. Thank you Amarok, you've really shown me the superiority of Linux music players!
For starters, can you actually play the audio files everyones else takes for granted. No major distro supports mp3s by default. Just install it yourself!!!! Joy. Yeah, this is what I went to Linux for, the convienice of dependancy hell.
And if you thought mp3 support was hell, wait till you browse network shares brimloaded with the fruits of iTunes' labour. AAC and m4a files almost completely dominate collections ripped using the latest versions of iTunes. You want to install support for m4a by yourself? Word to the wise; set aside a weekend. Preferably a long one.
And as to the so called "Jukebox" apps like Amarok and Rhythmbox, dear gods trust me when I say you are better off with xmms and bash scripts. They crash. A Lot. Not only that but they rely almost completely on id3 tags, which sucks if your music collection happens to be anything other than ripped from personal CDs or very good quality rips.
You want to know what Amarok did to me? I decided to add the windows network share music folder to its collection. What did Amarok do? It found every playlist file and helpfully changed all the nice neat relative paths to absolute paths. Yes, that's right! Every single playlist files has entries that begin with
If you want music on Linux, I'd recommend something like iTunes or Winamp over WINE or a VM, because the native apps aren't done cooking yet.
May the Maths Be with you!
Ease of use is a question that centers around which distro you're talking about, and for Ubuntu, the usability gap has closed significantly.
Ubuntu Dapper does everything I need it to do. I'll freely admit to a higher level of technical know-how than most users, but I didn't have to exercise any of it to install a usable distribution that had Rhythmbox configured to launch when I plug in my iPod, and that can read the HFS+ filesystem on it to boot. It took some doing to get everything the way I wanted it, but for a typical end-user, I don't think it would. Using Synaptic is pretty trivial for a user at any level.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
Apart from being quite trollish and unrelistic by today's Linux distributions standards, it seems the post is like a joke somebody writes each time we have a thread having to do with making Linux even more user friendly. The problem it's that it's not funny anymore.
Good idea's but you guys are all appoaching it the wrong way; I think you guys will not be able to keep up to the hardware as it gets cheaper and more technical in the future. Which will always keep you guys as the minority.
Sorry cold hard truth.
BTW, don't they just plug in and appear as a drive? Anyway...
It's all the peripherals. Your ipod, palm, nokia, cameras etc syncing with the calendar, todo, email, files etc. The problem isn't actually with Linux, it's with closed proprietary protocols. Saying the problem is with Linux is naive, the problem is with standardisation and with peripheral manufacturers writing software which works on several platforms. Its really an economic problem rather than a technical one.
Deleted
Moderators be aware...
This is a common anti-linux troll that pops up on occation when Linux usability is in discussion. Normally the app is quake.
Please take note how the AC didnt even bother to edit the whole post before submitting:
User: "How do I get my iPod to run in Windows?"
Zealot: "Oh that's easy! If you have Redhat, you have to download quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin....
He was saying... Don't let the facts get in the way of some good ol' penguin bashing.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
I competely agree. I've worked with computers for 20 years and built them for 10 of those years and I've never gotten any version of Linux to work on a machine. The most common thing were video drivers. The problem was it refused to boot up without a driver so I didn't know how to shoehorn a new one in. Other installs didn't like other hardware configurations and other versions I haven't a clue about why they refused to install. Yes I'm sure if I put in the wrench time in and crawled through the forums I could have figured it out but that's not the point. I should be able to at least get the bloody thing to install. I never got past a command line with any version. If I find it a hassle what is the average user going to think? Until it'll install on 90% of the machines out there it won't be more than for hackers and tinkers and companies with the deep pockets to hire techs. I was originally planning to migrate to a combination of Linux and Mac but I've narrowed it to Mac since Mac is painless to set up. They are turnkey systems that just need the software installed and require little or no maintainence. I want to focas on software not the OS.
I don't think anyone is really asking for support for M4P (those would be the encrypted, DRMed files purchased from the iTunes Media Store) files on Linux. Everyone realizes, I think, that there's no way to do DRM with open-source software, and frankly I think this is a Good Thing.
However, people use iTunes and iPods for a lot more than DRMed music. There is this tendency here on Slashdot to assume that everyone who uses iTunes or owns an iPod has purchased lots of music for it from the iTMS. This is not true, and in fact is provably wrong. The vast majority of music on most people's portable devices and in their music libraries, comes from ripped CDs (or from peer to peer).
Linux would be doing well if it could just come up with a library management program that was as good as iTunes is, and it would be doing better than iTunes if it made it as easy to download music OFF of the iPod as it is to put it on. (That is, to do the magical and frightening-to-media-companies "reverse syncronization.")
iTunes had a large userbase long before the Music Store existed: it gained popularity (back when it was a Mac-only program) because it has a good interface for managing a lot of songs and playlists. I have yet to see (although if someone wants to point one out I'd be interested) a Linux application that is the equal of it. All the Linux programs seem to assume that the OS' file browser is the best way to manage music, and that small single-purpose tools should be used to do syncronization or updating.
I remember what managing a large MP3 collection was like before nice library management programs were developed to automatically sort files into folders by Artist/Album, and it sucked. The file browser--even a good general-purpose browser (like Konqueror)--is not the tool for this job.
While this is very true to the "UNIX way," it's not what people want. People want big, monolithic, do-everything applications. They want something that's a media player, a library manager, a file uploader, an ID3 tag editor, and a portable-device-syncronization manager. If you could build a BitTorrent client and P2P browser into that at the same time, that would be great, too.
iTunes isn't good because of the Music Store, it's good despite it. There is a huge, gaping hole that the Linux community could fill if people desired to, for a program that's BETTER than iTunes: one that works seamlessly with the iPod but also works with other music stores (non-DRMed ones: AllOfMp3.com, eMusic, etc., plus free sources), and doesn't shy away from features because it would piss off music companies (sharing/streaming of music, true bidirectional syncronization).
Apple's software is hobbled by the company's relationship with the media companies and the necessity of flogging their own music store, not strengthened by it. It means that they have to produce crippled software, which doesn't do everything that it could otherwise. The FOSS community could run circles around iTunes; heck, they could make the closest thing that Linux has to a 'killer app' for home users. Going on about DRM is just a red herring; only a very few people can afford to buy large quantities of music from iTMS anyway, the great majority wouldn't be stopped by that from moving to a clearly superior piece of software, if one existed. To my knowledge, it does not. And that's why iTunes reigns supreme.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Same old arguments, based entirely on your personal experience or who you've chosen to listen to. In Ubuntu a user has only to click "Install new Software" from their gnome menu, click a check box or two for the programs they want (which have informative descriptions right there beside them...) and hit "ok." Free/LinSpire and PC-BSD have similar facilities.
No terminal, no hitting "next next I Agree next next ok next yes yes next finish" like in Windows, no hunting for the web site from which you can download the installer like in Windows.
You're posting old information and leveraging negative linux user stereotypes to reinforce the "validity" of your post and undermine the validity of dissenting opinions. If I had mod points, I'd label you -1 troll. Heck, your first sentence was a sweeping generalization that is just plain not true (as in the examples of Ubuntu, Free/LinSpire, and PC-BSD).
You chose to ignore facts when posting this. You chose to leverage stereotypes to grant yourself added undeserved credibility. You chose to decieve.
Mac OS X is going to beat Windows dominance on the desktop. Linux is not. (The iPod happens to work great with OS X.)
:)
I've been visiting this site since 1997 and I'm continually amazed at how often the "Linux will someday beat Windows" trope comes round. Once in a while, desktop Linux seems to score some isolated victory, particularly amongst cash-strapped school districts and municipal governments. But I'm guessing the non-top-down adoption rate on the desktop remains pegged where it was in 1997: zero. There's just not really any instances of normal, everyday (read: non-geek) people walking into Best Buy and walking out with a copy of Linux. To me that remains the benchmark of desktop adoption. Constructing a user-friendly desktop is really hard. It takes research into HID. It takes artists. It takes focus groups to see how people take to new features. It takes scads of documentation. These are all things that Apple does insanely well. These are all things that MSFT does sortakinda well. These are all things that a loose-knit bunch of hackers from across the globe, well, suck at. Can you really look at KDE or Gnome be reminded of anything other than a so-so imitation of Windows XP? I am considered pretty much a Unix wizard by friends and associates, and I can't even take the Linux GUI most of the time. I'm writing this on a laptop running XP. (Which will very soon be a Macbook Pro, just as soon as Merom ships
When Leopard comes out in early 2007, and Vista is still kicking around the halls of Redmond for another year, it's going to get interesting.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Hey, iTunes is a bloated piece of shit! Just having the application playing in the background playing uses lots of resources on my Power Mac G4, not to mention tagging files or searching through the library (I had to give up on searching and browse instead, because the iTunes was almost like freezing after every character I typed in). I quite recently bought a laptop and installed Ubuntu on it, and now I refuse to use anything but Quod Libet for listening to music! It is the ultimate music application!
Linux is aimed at a totally different audience than Windows. With that said, it seems like everyone talking about Linux lately wants it to Windows-ize itself and be easy to to figure out and learn like Windows. Sure I'd like to see Linux turn into an open source competition for Windows, but that's just not going to happen. Once it's easy to use it loses its effeciency for the gurus and most importantly it loses its appeal to the 90% of Linux users that use it because it's 'NOT Windows' and no other reason. People enjoy sitting around in an operating system they don't understand, and pretending they do, because it makes them feel superior to the 'peons' using Windows. With that aside, Linux needs - out of the box - support for mpegs, mp3s, avis, wmvs, etc... before it's even going to come close to defeating Windows. Why would I want to kill myself trying to attach my iPod to an operating system that can't even play an mpeg file without extensive research on forums and package installing that would break a noob down into tears.
Lets see.
Linux can't do something Windows and Mac OS X can do.
You got another way to define shortcoming?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
After beta testing Windows Vista I realized it was time to get off the sinking ship so I tried various flavors of Linux including Ubuntu which was actually the most usable linux distro I have ever played with. But I still don't consider linux a serious option for desktop users who don't want to spend a bunch of time tinkering with their systems. I've been an IT professional for over 8 years and I am not unfamiliar with unix/linux and I still found linux to be a frustrating experience, I could get it to work but it was an unecessary pain in the ass. For me I've switch to the Mac as a compromise for now. Linux is GREAT on the server side but it still has a long way to go on the desktop but the opportunity is now especially given what a piece of shit Vista is. However I think in the end it will likely be Apple that will be come out on top.....
I happen to like gtkpod – http://www.gtkpod.org/ – and amaroK... I'm an iPod nano addict myself, so I've made sure it's included in Ultima Linux if anyone cares (I've also linked amaroK to libgpod, so it's got everything except a music store now... works just fine for me :-)
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
The basic idea of itunes is just flawed (from my perpective at least)..
... you just connect it and an scsi device(on most systems) show up, you just have to mount it ....
.....
Most players, even my stupid Panasonic car radio can read-in an MP3 list on the fly, and then play it, so why not that super-intelligent-wonderful device?
As on any normal MP3 player I have seen, you could just drop the files onto the device, and then it would create a playlist from it....
That way you could use any system, not just that retarded Itunes. That way you could use m3u files as well.
But wait: this way you would not need a windows or a mac running that bloated crap, that is nothing but a "buy more from itunes" adware pile.
And here is what really bothers me: you cannot use iTunes store from where i live, and now they even stopped selling prepaid cards at the apple stores. Still I have to download a new version of their crap almost every 3 weeks, with bigger and bigger file sizes, while i could just drop files on an USB drive's filesystem, and then press play...
I think I am one of the very few people who is sick of his ipod in every single sense, except it's physical strength (i use it at the gym every day and get it wet, and hit it with weights and run with it... then usually steam it for a few hours in my gym-bag's front with my wet heartrate monitor)
Other than that: sound:ok i guess, earphones:garbage, interface awkward, functions:bloat, control:complicated (always those menus with the idiotic scrolling)......
Oh if that little function existed, you could use it with linux just fine, as far as usb drives are enabled
mounting something too complicated? I guess do not use linux, that is my advice
Yeah, it's the peripherals. It was the constant fussing with Linux patches just to watch DVDs, or to do USB that drove me to give OSX a try when it first appeared, back in the day.
But virtualization can change that. The ability to run Linux or Mac OS X or Windows as a virtual machine on top of Linux, or OS X, or Windows is a huge win. It means that you can have your cake and eat it, too - you can use what ever OS you need to run the app or connect to the peripheral, then switch back to the OS you'd rather use for whatever it is you need to do next.
Clear, Dark Skies
Step 1. Open Add/Remove Plugins
Step 2. Select Banshee and click ok
Step 3. Start Banshee
Step 4. Plug in Ipod
Well, let's put this in perspective a bit.
My preferred mail client is Evolution... but Windows can't run it.
By your logic, that's a Windows shortcoming because Novell hasn't created a Windows version?
Interesting thought, but I don't follow.
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
As a consumer with more than just an iPod, I say that any music sales system in which I the music cannot easily be transferred onto, say, my PDA, can go to hell.
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Why does Linux have to appeal to anyone but the people who use it? I thought that was the whole point. If you don't feel like paying for software then you've either got to write it yourself or wait for someone to give it to you (or steal it, but that's another topic). And this is exactly what the Linux community has done; as many people here have pointed out you can use an iPod in Linux (to say nothing of using Linux on an iPod). So the majority of people find using Linux to be too difficult? So what? They can just pay for a simpler OS that does work for them. It's like paying someone to clean your house, wash your car, make you food, or any number of services, and if you're someone who's not willing to pay for those services then you either have to do them yourself, or find someone who will do it voluntarily (or to enslave).
This article is lame. It's more ESR claptrap.
1: iPods work under linux. Through the hard, evidently thankless, work of people reverse engineering them. Depending on which distribution you use, when you plug your iPod in, the icon that pops up on the desktop will be the correct model and colour.
2: iTunes will never work under linux, unless under wine or similar. iTunes is Apple Computer Inc.'s proprietary music distribution service. It is not open to outsiders. There have been several efforts to make compatible clients through reverse engineering so you can buy music off the music store ( not sure why you'd want to ), but this will not be iTunes. It won't have the branding, and it won't be exactly the same. Which is what you people clearly want and won't stop complaining until you get.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Silly Nastard, this is a conversation that draws in the OSS community on a site that already largely attracts the OSS crowd. The mere existence of DRM makes it a mess, round here.
There is no middle-ground, rights management is evil, and anything that uses it must be burned.
Yes, we do. People like you and I can still kick back with our kind in IRC channels and the type of place they'll never go, but without being a mainstream fixture on the desktop, Linux's growth will be very limited and Linux will always be doomed to playing catch-up.
The folks that hold the IP for MP3... Ask for a fee of ~70 cents for every copy of an mp3 enabled system you ship. That means in order to ship this in a free system SuSE would either have to charge per copy or take that hit themselves. This fee can be avoided by paying a once up amount I think it approaches the $50,000 mark I am not sure but it certainly is in the tens of thousands. It is up to each distro whether they want to take the legal risk of distributing mp3 support without paying. This is all stuff that the consumer perhaps shouldn't have to worry about - but there you have it. There are usually 3rd party packages which allow you to add mp3 support but you have to do it yourself. What makes this a further kick in the teeth is that Linux already has access to an open format that is superior to MP3 in everyway except market penetration (and purhaps CPU usage)...
couldn't do something so simple as using a file manager.
Believe it or not, iTunes hides the Shuffle from Windows. If you plug a shuffle into a machine that doesn't have iTunes installed, it will appear as a drive.
At least, mine did when I first got it. Maybe newer ones are different?
Clear, Dark Skies
greater than 1% marketshare? Oh noes! Also, shoddy job with the search+replace. Better luck next time.
On my OpenSUSE 10.1:
- Open Amarok
- Attach iPod Nano
- Amarok pops up a box that asks if I want to use it to manage a new iPod
- Click affirmative
- Transfer, delete, manage music and podcasts at will
I have not read the article so I don't understand the issue. Are the using a two-year-old version of some odd distro?
Is it just me that thinks that the "troll" was trying to be funny? Quake 3, indeed...
Remember that Apple's iTunes music is encoded with its DRM. So you cannot legally play iTunes-encoded music on the iPod.
This is an absolutely untrue statement.
Hopefully it's just being spoken out of ignorance and not malice, but at any rate, it's misleading.
iTunes encodes music that you rip from a CD to bog standard MP3 files, WAV files, AIFF files, or AAC files. With the exception of AAC files, which despite being an open format may not have a Linux codec, all of them work equally well on all platforms, using any number of different players.
The only DRMed files which get produced by iTunes (and I'm not really sure whether it's even fair to say that iTunes makes them per se) are the files purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Those are the 99-cents-a-song ones.
Maybe I don't hang out with a rich enough crowd, but I don't know anyone with more than a dozen or so iTMS-purchased tracks, and I know a lot of iTunes users. It's just not practical to buy an iPod which holds 20,000 songs and fill it up at $1 a song. As I've said before, the only people who can afford to do that, probably also have someone who's job it is to buy music for them, and don't give a damn which software it uses anyway.
It is an outright lie to say that iTunes encodes music to a DRMed format, given that the great majority of people's files do not come from the Music Store, but from CDs. The only software I know that ever did that was a Sony product that came with MD players, and ripped CDs to an DRMed ATRAC format, and an early version of Windows Media Player, which ripped CDs to WMV format.
Don't spread FUD.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
On Fedora Core 5:
Applications > System Tools > Software Updater
Enter root password.
From there you're on your own, I personally prefer the command line version of yum to the GUI. But there is a GUI available.
If something I said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, I meant the other one.
Well you can wake me up when iTunes displays song lyrics on the fly, pulls up Wikipedia entries on the artist, sorts music in a sane manner, does not phone home on your music collection for an "enhanced" buying experience, is fully skinable so you can get rid of that 1900 Ford mentality of "They can have it look however they want as long as it is this shitty minimalist skin", and supports ALL the music file formats i want to use like .ogg
And I wouldn't brag about iTunes music store as a feature considering they don't even really sell YOU a song...With their permission you are granted the right to listen to their music on a limited number of computers.
Oh and did I mention that it's memory footprint is about 1/4 of iTunes?
Oh and did I mention that it KICKS the llamas ass?
"All those moments, will be lost in time...like tears in rain..."
Linux is consumer friendly, what isn't is DRM. Can I get an iPod w/ DRM? Will "Zune" be available without DRM? The consumer needs to be educated about DRM. All DRM does is rob the consumer of his or her fairuse rights. It allows those the mandate it to steal from the unedcuated consumer over and over.
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
No, you're making it to case-specific. The only way to have significant appeal is to offer something that the masses want, that your competitor can't.
And guess what? The masses want iPod compatability. It's something Windows can offer, and Linux can't.
you do realise ipods are not Mp3 players
they are DRM music devices
mp3 players are usb mass storage and require no software....
retards buy retarded devices i guess
hey look a bums dying on tv...
Do not feed the trolls :)
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
It's hard to explain to someone, that Vi is far easier/faster and more efficient than Notepad. Part of this, is becuase GUI translates to "Ease" to those that know no better. I assert, that Rule No. 1 be: "Ease of Use has NOTHING to do with whether something SEEMS 'Intuitive'." Why? Becuase the unspoken parts of "Ease of Use" are the parts you DON'T see so scratch the GUI... such as that icon labelled "Setup" actually doing what you would expect it to do. And, do it well... but wait, let's take a step back a second. What did I say? "...actually doing what you would expect it to do..." Yes, here's another rub for sure, need I elaborate on what an idiot might expect? For Christ's sake, the only reason Virus Scanners exist is becuase of an expectation of the idiot!
I don't care if Linux is EVER dominate on the desktop. I'd prefer it not be. Let Windows reign supreme on the backs of all cows and sheep for all I care. They deserve what they get. As for those that know the first thing about computing, let them make a most informed decision on what to use. I don't care about "market share", that is a capitalist phrase which means nothing to me and in no way effects my decision to contribute or release my own work for free. The moment someone uses capitalists jargon and phrases in reference to Open Source, I usually stop listening as they clearly have no idea what they are talking about; nevermind their blatant lack of vision to properly distinguish the two philosophies.
What we have here, is the value between experts and laymen. Linux has done well, will continue to do well, regardless if it ever overthrows Windows on the desktop and gain the hearts and minds of the sheep. Why? That's simple....
Take any hobby or interest. Creative is surely "larger" than MOTU, yet, who do you think actually has more clout to influence the industry? Not Creative, that's for damn sure. Why? Becuase professionals and experts, sound engineers and sound producers regard MOTU and their software/equipment much more than Creative's low-quality merchandise targetting the everyday person. Who, logically, do you think is following who? Creative follows the industry players that have the most approval of the experts within the field of music and audio production. MOTU doesn't go to Creative to ask what the mass "market" wants... they go to the multi-million dollar studios and big name musicians and ask THEM what THEY want.
The ONLY thing the Linux community needs to maintain is our level of expertise. So, when a CEO needs to ask a question, who better to ask? The Windows gang there, or the Linux gurus over there? Now, this might depend on the question. But, I highly doubt that any question regarding the bits and bytes of the technology will ever be addressed to the Windows crowd. "Is the structure of this protocol feasible for 'X' application?", "Should our new interface be openly defined as a standard or is it better at this point in time to keep it proprietary?" These kinds of questions, and the answers that are considered GOVERN the direction and application of upcoming and present technologies! Forget the GUI and Ease of Use crap that's only targetting people interested in 'after-the-fact' technologies awarded by a board that doesn't give a hoot about anything but profit and if that means confusing the consumer, decieving the consumer or outright taxing the consumer... they will do so.
Linux experts are listened too. Purchasing decisions are made based off our suggestions. Our small numbers only serve to saturate our experts into an identifiable group of people; which means, while there are a few very smart Windows programme
Let me correct myself before someone else does. Applications > System Tools > Software updater to UPDATE software, Applications > Add/Remove Software to add / remove software.
If something I said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, I meant the other one.
You are so suckered by the music industry. iTunes gives you DRM garbage without long term credibility. It's a step backward from analog, except for convenience of play. Free media is technically superior and easier to use than non free.
Burn? Why? CDs are an input and an archive. I save my wavs as gziped tar archives and play them as oggs.
Amazingly enough, I can buy CDs and listen to my music with Amarok. Reasonable services will sell you FLAC without DRM. Reasonable bands let you trade their concerts without charge. iTunes does not live up to the Amarok + Wikipedia + Lyrics experience, nor is it's database as good. As time goes by, the gap in quality will widen.
As usual, non free is getting it's ass kicked and people are routing around it. Artist and users are getting a better deal elsewhere. When they fold and leave you without a key to what you purchased, you will understand why the deal was raw to begin with. I've digitized my parents and my grandparents music collections and will be able to give them to my kids. I'm not buying into something that will prevent that. Your player won't last forever, but the music and the culture it represents should.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Bad example. Evolution is an Outlook clone. Windows doesn't need to run Evolution. It already has the real McCoy.
The iPod has 75% MP3 Player marketshare in the US. Linux can't run iTunes. Thats a major shortcoming no matter how you try to spin it.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I can transfer songs to my old iPod mini using gtkpod and amarok, which is fine. The only problem I have is when my brother connect the device using iTunes on Windows, the program erases all the existing songs. No problem, I can just smack my brother on the head and retransfer.
However, almost a year ago I bought a Creative Zen Vision (due to the new iPod haven't arrived on my country yet, plus this Zen Vision has audio recording and FM radio capability). To this day I haven't been able to use Linux to upload my songs. Sigh.
Except what they're talking about here is not another piece of "every bit of hardware in existance", it's the single most popular music player on the market, and probably the most ubiquitous peripheral out there right now.
It's like the day I tried to install Linux and it wouldn't write to my data disc which was formatted in NTFS. No, it's not Linux's fault, but it made me go, "oh well, it would've been nice, but it's too much bother". A reaction that I promise you is more common than any other.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
No, No we don't.
Why does anyone think we do? I don't understand.
But linux constitutes a negligible part of the desktop market. So small infact, that it wouldn't be profitable to port the iTunes to linux.
So you're suggesting that that the community should just throw up its hands? Wouldn't it be much more effective to take a page from Real's playbook, and actually get to work fixing the the problem? No. Of course not. Self-rightous whining always carries the day.
Then Apple can keep those customers. If users do not care that their stuff is defective by design, then they will not truly appreciate the value of open source and linux. Customers will come around when they are tired of vendor lock-in, DRM, and licensing restrictions. These are consumers who have yet to learn their lesson. So let them get screwed a few more times and, hopefully, they will learn.
I have concluded that "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" rants like TFA and "This is the Year of Linux on the Desktop" raves are both equally irrelevant, because they both miss the point.
If an attractive, usable desktop environment with excellent multimedia capabilities were what it took to make a desktop computing platform dominant, I wouldn't be typing this comment from my Windows box at work. We'd all be using Amigas. The /. Macolytes will argue that we all would have been (and still should be) using Apple Macintoshes of one description or other. Let's review, though: the Amiga is on the dustbin of history. The Mac soldiers along, but for all its "Volkskomputer" propaganda, only a relatively small proportion of relatively affluent Macolytes ever use them.
What dominated the desktop? What made the Personal Computer a commodity item? Bring yourself to say it: IBM-Compatibles running MS-DOS. They were ugly and primitive. It were single-user/single-task systems. Keeping one running initiated a user or administrator into the secret world of cryptic command lines and oracular error messages (ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?). It certainly wasn't an attractive platform by any standard now applied....and yet it completely trounced all its competitors. Why?
Because it was extremely attractive to the sort of person we don't like here on /.--procurement types. It was "good enough," they were "smart enough," and, goshdarnit, the IBM-compatibles ran Lotus 1-2-3! Industry kicked off the massive adoption feedback loop, and, flash forward to the present day, we're all in a Microsoft universe.
We will leave that universe NOT because the competition offers a compelling, beautiful, secure product that is compatible with the latest Apple blobject. We will leave it when the same hated procurement types start to calculate that the costs of staying in proprietary software outweigh those of running Free software. Once the argument is framed in those terms, the adoption loop will turn again, and people will be forced to use the platform they use at work, at school, or wherever.
If Linux is or isn't ready for YOU, that's really your decision. But it's pointless to evaluate desktop Linux's chances of mass adoption assuming that the masses will all flock to a better, more secure, and more usable platform without being compelled to do so by some external force.
Go get LAME from http://lame.sf.net/ and most Linux players will work fine. The reason LAME can't be included in the distro, if I remember correctly, is that the MP3 patent in the USA forbids distribution of alternative (non-Fraunhofer) MP3 codecs.
~ C.
"They're Apple's users too (and they're Apple's customers)."
... and a learning experience. Is that not one of the reasons why we like the OS? Take that away and you have a nice, free, and noble OS that doesn't always do what you want it to, and rarely does it without some specific settings or knowledge; so honestly, who can ever rightfully claim that such an OS will ever become the standard. It wont. not in its present form.
and that is their problem... not linux's
Having said that... People make their system choices based on what it can do and how easily it can do it. I am a fan of linux but clearly, it isn't the easiest thing to use with the amount of products that Windows will support. Apple is locked into the devices it designs (and for whatever reason some people are willing to walk into that cage and even close the door behind themselves) but they generally DO work.
Many things in Linux end up becoming a battle
Years down the road, though, I think its likely that it will rise to a standard of acceptance and ease of use that makes it a real contender.
The next question is: how quickly will proprietary designs adapt to prevent that?
You can bet both MS and Apple will start to "improve" devices and OS components to make compatibility a greater challenge.
That's funny... I installed ubuntu like this:
Then I was online. I clicked on "Syntaptic Package Manager" and checked the box for "Banshee". I clicked "Apply". After it downloaded, I plugged in my iPod nano, pulled my music off of it, and began to listen.
You're right, that was really hard. Fuck. I mean, it's a good think I'm a software developer, or I wouldn't have made it through that.
Don't even get me started on video cards. Mine burned out, so I bought a new one. I booted into Linux - didn't have to change a thing. I booted into Windows... whoops! Driver incompatibility - no GUI for you. What? You can't get to a command line without first booting into the GUI or entering some arcane key combination on boot? And who knows how to install graphics drivers from the command line in Windows, anyway? Well damn, I guess reinstallation is the only option. Or buy a card identical to the one that burned out.
Funny. I click to install my linux apps. You must be talking about those debian people.
Nope, we like clicking too.
Ohh, I remember synaptic. Damn nice program.
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All you're doing with that statement is placing blame. It may be Apple's "fault", but it's still a Linux shortcoming any way you slice it.
Really, it's not that the "younger generation" wants their iPod to work with Linux, because it does that now. What they want is iTunes + iPod, and they want it to either come with the OS or install with a single click. They want it to be easy and they want it to be familiar, and the only entity that can do that is Apple.
What makes iPods complicated to use on GNU/Linux desktops, is the iTunesDB file that has to be parsed and written for the iPod firmware to be happy. If it wasn't for that, you could just mount it as a regular USB drive, and copy the files over.
A friend of mine recently bought an iPod video, and had a few fights with his media player while trying to compile an iPod plugin for it, but with no luck. When he came over to my place, I suggested that he could switch firmware to Rockbox. The installation might not have been the easiest, using dd to extract the firmware from the iPod's HDD, compile a tool which was then used to patch the original firmware with a bootloader, and then copy onto it the Rockbox binaries afterwards.
However, it is now possible to just copy music into the mounted iPod using any file browser, and it'll show up in Rockbox immidiately. Rockbox also offers many new features to iPod owners. Does the Apple firmware play OGG Vorbis or FLAC files? WavPack? AC3, then? Rockbox still can't play video files, though, but the Rockbox bootloader actually sets up a dual boot environment, so that you're able to switch over for watching videos, or playback DRM'ed files, if you have to.
Wrong.
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
Does anyone have any fucking clue what anyone else is talking about in this discussion? Have anyone here even tried to use an iPod under Linux? There's a dozen tools to do it, it's not like the iPod's database is rocket science, and there's a library to do it, which lists half a dozen projects using it, including amaroK, the most popular Linux mp3 player.
It's slightly more complicated than other mp3 players, where you can just drag and drop, but that's exactly as true under Windows. (And, under Linux, there apparently is, indeed, a user space filesystem that lets you drag and drop, although setting that up is more complicated than just using amaroK or Rhythmbox.)
The only shortcomings on Linux is you can't use iTunes and the Apple music store, which are, indeed, shortcomings, but they're hardly Linux's fault, or an iPod support issue. It's due solely to the fact that the Apple music store or whatever the name is, is limited solely to working within iTunes. The word 'iPod' didn't even appear in that sentence. If Apple would port iTunes to Linux, the store would work perfectly fine.(1)
If the question is 'Can I used my Apple purchased music in, and copy it to my iPod from within, Linux?', people under 30, the answer is 'No'. That music, as you probably were told when you purchased it, required a Mac or PC. If you do not use the Apple store, you are completely and perfectly supported under Linux.
And, as an added bonus, almost all music copy protection schemes either fail completely, aka, the autorun ones like the recent Sony debacle, or can be trivially corrected for, like the incorrectly formatted CDs designed to trick computers. (Most of the time this correction is automatic.)
1) Of course, they can't do that, because it would utterly trivial to crack iTunes's DRM on Linux. OTOH, it's utterly trivally to 'crack' it anyway by burning it to a CD and ripping it again. You can even use a single CD-RW repeatedly. (I'm not sure if there's such a trivial way to crack the video DRM, though.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I thought the mp3 player fee was only applied if you, the maker of the mp3 player, charged for the player itself. As I understood it, as long as the player was free, there was no royalty. ..?
Nathan Friedly
Sorry troll, your argument falls apart in two places.
First, Whether or not Evolution is an "Outlook clone" is irrelevant. It is possible for the copy to be better than the original, and whether or not you think that's the case here, if someone has a preference for one they are regardless not going to be as happy without it.
And Linux not being able to run iTunes has no effect on its iPod compatibility. I've been using my iPod with Linux for a long time now. Hell, if I want to shop at the iTMS with Linux, I can do that too. This means that the lack of a Linux iTunes port is at worst a minor inconvenience, not a "major shortcoming". There are Windows apps that aren't available for OS X (and vice versa), but when there are decent alternatives nobody rants about how the those platforms are "not ready for the desktop". The alternatives are there, and they work fine.
This poo is cold.
I read this summary and simply *had* to poke my iPod, which is sitting infront of me, plugged into this Fedora Core 5 machine, to make sure it was still there. I agree with other posters, iTunes is bloated and crappy, and linux has great support for the iPod. FC5 instantly recognizes it, and I use (and prefer) GTKpod which is slim, simple and fast for importing/editing my iPod songs.
How is it the article so elegantly avoided the obvious answer to it's intro question, 'will <Linux> work with my iPod?' Shouldn't somebody be writing an article about how Linux is keeping up with the times so well, as it has multiple free programs that offer great ipod support?
Our wealth breeds emptiness
So, mindless tools have been excluded from the Linuverse? Now we just need the kernel to die everytime a user connects to myspace.
i've run linux on my desktop for years, and while i think its pretty easy to do everything i want to do, i concede its sometimes a bit much for joe user. not that any other OS is any different.
my ipod works fine when hooked up to my linux pc, although i thought i'd trashed it on the first connection ( hadnt realised it was hfs formatted, copied one track and yanked out the usb cable.. bad move)
what really surprises me though is that there arent more corporates or educational institutions rolling out linux on the desktop. i push it wherever i go.. not too hard, just open up my dell 9300 with fedora 5, and let em ask questions (ooooh... is that a mac? seems to come up a bit!)
surely something like ' hard to plug ipods into' would be a selling point?
Linux can't do something Windows and Mac OS X can do.
That is simply not true.
The correct, sane way to phrase that is:
iTunes has not been ported to Linux. Ergo, anything you can only do in iTunes, you cannot do within Linux. This is basically anything to do with the Apple music store. The reason only iTunes can do anything WRT to Apple music store is that cracking DRM is illegal, which is why you can't do those things in other Windows or Mac applications either.
There are no technical reasons that iTunes has not been ported to Linux. It is purely an Apple business decision.
Now, that might, indeed, be a legitimate reason not to switch to to Linux. It is not, however, a 'Linux shortcoming', anymore than the fact you can't purchase Civ 4 for Linux is a 'Linux shortcoming'. It's an iTunes shortcoming. Linux, and in fact all third-parties, are legally barred from producing something that can do everything iTunes can.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Open source gurus at LinuxWorld discuss solutions to make Linux more consumer-friendly.
...
In the meantime in Redmond and Cupertino, some people actually implement them.
"A panel discussion at LinuxWorld urged developers on Wednesday to get religion about Linux on the desktop and consider the generation of users who expect music and video at their fingertips."
Religion !!! I dont think developers need more religion...
I think ESR, Jon "Maddog" Hall, Larry and all this bunch of "panelist" should maybe hire and pay developers to develop the Linux Desktop instead of just flying around the world preaching about it and relying on starving student to catchup with Vista and MacOS...
There is enough talent among linux developers to create a viable Linux Desktop, but no one is actually harnessing this power.
They did it for Firefox, no stop bitching and do something if you want Linux Desktop to happen
Me? I dont care about linux on the desktop for the masses...
Your gushing assesment of all the wonderful possibilities provided by "Amarok" simply prove that there are alternatives to iTunes and products that are similar. It does not "prove" in any way your assertion that iTunes and other DRM-protected music services are inherently inferior to "Amarok" or whatever for the sole reason of not being "free". Who are these people that "as usual" are "routing" around "Amarok", exactly? Are they any of the millions of happy iTunes users that are getting their "asses kicked", perhaps? How do you know that the iTunes database is "not as good"? Where is this "gap in quality" that is "widening"? If anything, iTunes is widening the gap in regards to everything else. Would you care to prove otherwise? And WTF does Wikipedia have to do with anything? Because it has out of date and plain wrong artist biographies filled with fancruft and edited by people with cultural agendas? Or are you referring to these mythical "reasonable bands" that must live on applause and air?
Please, please stop it with the "let me tell you how it is" free-as-in-whatever religious arguments. You're not convincing anyone, trust me.
..in various posts, let me summarize how the article's implication of poor ipod support is total bullshit and ipod works with linux just fine (in fact, better than with windows).
libipod ( http://libipod.sourceforge.net/ ) is the library that interacts with the database on the ipod that stores your music.
Several music players on linux like amarok ( http://amarok.kde.org/ ), rhythmbox ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/ ), gtkpod ( http://www.gtkpod.org/about.html ),( http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/juk.html ) etc have plugins/embeddings that can interact with the library seamlessly
Ipods are detected just fine by the USB mass storage driver with no probems in any modern linux distro.
Itunes can be run thru wine (though I've never tried it), and Sharpmusique
( http://nanocrew.net/software/sharpmusique/ ) can connect with itunes, buy music, download and strip off the DRM so that the files can be played anywhere.
CD-ripping and transfer to ipod can be done seamlessly in amarok (if you have lame etc installed). It's easier than in windoze thru third party rippers and itunes where there are all sorts of restrictions and issues.
Both "pc-compatible" (fat filesystem) as well as "mac-compatible" (HFS filesystem) will work equally well on any linux box coz linux has drivers for both filesystems.
Last but not least, there is ipodlinux ( http://ipodlinux.org/Main_Page ), where you can install linux firmware in your ipod itself. Advantage is that you can play videos in your nano, music management is thru filesystem rather than database so just treat it as a mass storage device in any OS, and a host of other linux stuff will work on it, and you can play any music format that can be played on linux, not just mp3's (ogm,wma etc). You can even play quake on it if you want.
My nano ran just fine with my Mandrake box with no probs. Anecdotally, I had more problems with it on windoze (usb connection to it acted wierdly, though the usb bus was fine; I didn't care enough to analyze what was up).
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Sheesh, for the millionth time folks, Linux doesn't usually ship with mp3 support because of licensing issues. It certainly isn't the fault of the various Linux distributions. If mp3 was an open format, they'd ship it out of the box. And really, is opening Synaptic, checking the LAME (or xmms-w32codecs for that matter) checkbox and hitting install that difficult to figure out?
While I'm no fan of DRM, Apple supposedly does lets you reset all your authorization, for every computer you've ever authorized, from within your account. Then, I suppose, you have to reactive the computers you actually use. I don't know how that works, click around the authorization area until you find it.
And it's a mess because some of us don't want to use one application and one brand of MP3 player for the rest of our life. I've tried iTunes and I don't like it, and I certainly don't want to be weilded to it. The fact it isn't even available on Linux, which I don't currently use but have in the past and probably will in the future, is just icing on the cake.
Any proprietory format is a mess. Any proprietory format it is illegal for anyone else to support is a huge mess.
And the fact you have 'authorization', which means that if all this ever goes away, it will be DiVX all over again, except instead of DVDs you can't play anymore you'll have files you can't decode anymore.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And disappointingly, its always still current. Linux has a seriously split personality and I don't think its ever been the right way to be. On one hand we have this excellent well documented, stable server platform. Here I love it. Couldn't ask for anything more (don't hate me BSD users!).
Of course the flip is the 'ready to dominate the desktop' thing. I've been using Linux for about 8 years and the one thing I haven't seen is a distro thats ready to take the place of a real, dedicated user environment.
Now I'm guessing that making it ugly and cludgy by trying to keep both the archaic (but server friendly) aspects together with the newer (and definitely still immature) GUI pieces is a big part of the problem.
I've got a box that can do everything, but only half as well. Its silly really. Top it off with the nuts and their struggle against *any* real change and you get exactly what you should expect to get: a system thats terminally mired in a wealth of old-school ideas (filesystem layout, lack of consistent driver API, DE abstraction, application fragmentation, etc).
For a lot of people these things are all very good, but for the 'average' user it make Linux the subtle nightmare that it really is.
I've been practically begging, for years, for someone to break the rules. Piss RMS off. I don't care really. Just give me an operating system that works like its 2006, proprietary drives and ALL.
I'm using XP Pro now. I'll probably end up moving to Apple at some point because I respect them for focusing on the front end and still giving their users the power on the back end (exactly where Linux distro's get it all cocked up).
Anyway, basically, I think its fear of rocking the boat and if there is *anything* more constricting then proprietary code thats definitely it.
Quack, quack.
Yup.
This reminds me of the time I was talking to someone online who asked 'How do I use a USB flash drive under Linux?'.
My answer? /dev/something /dev/something /directory/to/mount/it/in'
1. Plug it in.
2. Get a root command line up and type 'dmesg' to see what it was named. It will be
3. Type 'mount
And they broke in and said 'Wait, wait, when I plugged it in it popped up on my screen. I'll just use that.'.
I was laughing at both myself and them for five minutes.
Incidentally, that's not an apples-to-apples comparison, as I'm fairly certainly you have to install iTunes, or another loader, to use an iPod under Windows. You can use it as a USB drive without that, but to put music on it you need a program specifically designed to do that, like under Linux, but unlike Linux, Windows doesn't come with one.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Someone else in this thread has already pointed out to me that you can in fact access the iTunes Music Store from Linux using a Linux app.
As to your response. Can you think of a more convoluted way of saying what you said? Would the average user care about DRM or why they couldn't connect to the iTunes Music store? I mean come on. Is there any way for me to point out how much of a pedant you sound like without getting modded down? This is exactly what regular folk are talking about when they say "Can you explain this to me in English?" DRM? GAHHH!
Simply put, if you can't do something you can't do it. Don't want to know the particulars. Just if you can or you can't. (It just so happens in this case you can but you get my point.)
Just so you know here's how you access the iTunes Music Store on Linux: http://nanocrew.net/software/sharpmusique/
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Linux is missing vital abilities. Linux users say sour graps. Other linux users say it sorta works but yu have to do 100 things and you dont get all the features. other linux users say it's an evil plot from the man to ruin everyones lives (more sour grapes). Silly little masochist apologists. Get a job, buy a Mac. Get the best of all worlds. Ankle-biting will get you nowhere.
I've been upgraded to "bad"!
DRM-locked music is inherently inferior to free music. I've got flac or ogg versions of all the music I like, and can get flac or ogg versions of all the music I want. And you know what? I'd PAY for that, if anyone had the temerity to sell such service. I just won't pay for DRM-corrupted art of any kind. I don't need it and I don't miss it. I'm not a college-kid either. My friends and associates have musical tastes that run the gamut from classical and world music to jazz, and any flavor of rock or pop you could think of. Oh, and country. Know what? None of us will use DRM-fouled products. That's just the way it is, and we're not the poorer for it. But the music industry will be poorer for not having us as customers. The world is full of music of all kinds. You can hear absolutely everything and anything without resorting to DRM-damaged products. And if the music industry collapsed and died tomorrow, musicians would still find a way to be heard - at least the good ones would. Now kiss my ass you miserable clerk for some avaricious entertainment lawyer.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hey, that's pretty slick. I might have to give that a try! Thanks for the linkage. :)
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
I second that!
Amarok is amazing, and it supports iPods and regular USB Storage MP3 players, it also has PodCasting support, CD cover discovery and download, a context browser with lots of features, a powerfull scripting engine, and much more!
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
The iPod has 75% MP3 Player marketshare in the US. Linux can't run iTunes. Thats a major shortcoming no matter how you try to spin it.
Apple went well out of their way to make sure the iPod only works on specific platforms. That is not a shortcoming of Linux.
That fact that there are so many workarounds available to MAKE iPods work with Linux if anything demonstrates a very serious plus for it.
And I don't like Outlook. I prefer Evolution. Until recently there was not a Win32 port of Evolution, it only ran on Unix or Linux.
And no matter how you want to spin it, that is not a shortcoming of Windows.
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
In addition to that a quick search for ipod on Gnome Files turns up Banshee , Rhythmbox , Listen and Yamipod>{not open source} , all of these look like nice options for iPod and music library management under linux but Banshee and Listen really stand out. No DRM of course but there is an entry on codeweavers' site for iTunes though i've no idea how compatible it is at this stage.http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/bro wse/name?app_id=134
Software Freedom Day!.
If you can't find a way to sync your iPod with your Linux machine you haven't really been looking!
When will we get to mod articles "-1, Troll"?
0 1 - just my two bits
As I pointed out to someone else already, Apple went well out of their way to ensure that the iPod only works on platforms they want it to.
My Archos MP3 player is about as cross-platform as anything I've seen... did they design it to work with Linux? No.
But they didn't go out of their way to prevent its use with Linux. Apple didn't HAVE to make it so you can't load songs on it with ONLY iTunes.
But for their own very good reasons, they did.
That is not a shortcoming of Linux.
People have pointed out numerous times in the discussion on this article that there are multiple ways to get iPods to work on Linux and even iTMS to work from a Linux workstation. Despite Apple's efforts, it is still possible to do it... not always the most user-friendly of methods, but it is still possible.
It would be easier if they didn't put so many obstacles in the path of users just wanting to use a product with their operating system of choice... as I mentioned above, my MP3 player manufactured by Archos works just fine. It's dirt simple to use. Plug it in, put whatever I want on it, songs, videos, playlists, photos, whatever. And it all just works. Even on Slackware.
By contrast, in order to get an iPod to work on the same laptop, I'd have to do some pretty stupid shit, and even then there's no guarantee.
I would think that a company as adept in the consumer electronics business as Apple would be a bit better at making something easy to use, and you know damned well they can. They simply chose not to.
Again I ask, how on earth is that a shortcoming of Linux?
Other MP3 players work just fine on it with no "workarounds" or hacks. Sounds to me like it's the iPod that has shortcomings.
My wife discovered one just today when she was trying to copy the songs off her iPod to her laptop so she could listen to music while she was working in a different room of the house and didn't want headphones on so she could hear if the phone rang. Apparently there's no way to copy music off of it without either downloading some 3rd party freeware utilities or digging around the device's file structure to find some hidden folder.
That utterly baffles me. People keep talking about how "easy to use" these things are, but at every turn Apple has placed barriers to do what I would consider to be very simple, intuitive things.
The more time goes by, the more glad I am I didn't buy one when I was contemplating doing so... the one my wife has is maddeningly frustrating on a number of levels, and all of it seems to be by design.
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
An important factor of the whole Ipod/Itunes issue, and many others issues with Linux 'compatibility' has to do with brand awareness. Amarok and Radio Shack .mp3 player with Kaffeine Et Al will never be good enough, or better because it doesn't have that trendy "every one else is using it" panache of an Ipod with Itunes. It's like the generic K-mart Traxx sneakers versus Nike's. You may run twice as fast and the shoes may be more comfortable ad infinitum; but for some people it's the Nike swoosh logo that counts more than anything else. I am not saying I agree with this mentality, but many users think with this herd mentality....
The iPod has 75% MP3 Player marketshare in the US.
;-)
Not to mention, I'm sure that since the fact that the iPod is used by such a huge majority, that must mean it's the best. Since if a majority of people like it, that automatically means it's better?
Kinda like elected officials?
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
I'm sure you know the actual solution is to boot into safe mode.
Of course, I'll be damned if I know how the average end user is supposed to know that.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And windows isn't a hassle? C'mon...any OS can be difficult in one way or the other, but all it takes is a little time and patience, just like it was back in the old days..
LAME is an encoder. It can't play MP3s.
What you want is application specific. If you try to play an MP3 in a music app, it will usually tell you what to do.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
there is a pretty wide gap between any media app on Linux and iTunes, QuickTime or even Windows Media Player. The whole media experience is inferior on my Ubuntu box as compared to my Mac mini, there is just no argument. On Linux I watch video in a small, usually non-resizable window with questionable if not absolutely bad sound. Amarok is a step in the right direction but far from the overall experience I get with iTunes, they do a nice job of copyiing the library functions and basic functions are the same, but it isn't nearly as intuitive to use. We could go on all day with these comparisons, but there isn't much to debate, for a rich meida experience Linux is not the best choice.
I've had a far easier time getting wireless cards to work with Linux then Vista. Are you sure you have a well known card and not some generic?
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
i've been using my ipod nano in amarok for months now. works perfectly. just like itunes... and i believe amarok is a much more capable music playerto begin with.
There is nothing overly technical about the iPod. Strip away Apple's intentional defects in its design and it's just another hard-drive based portable digital music device.
But they block you from loading music on it except with their software.
They block you from moving music off of it.
They do this on purpose.... these are not problems because Apple has made the iPod "more technical". They are problems because the designers of this device went the extra mile to make it as difficult as they could to use the device in any ways other than how they want you to.
The difficulty people have in Linux using iPods is not because of any level of complexity of the device itself... as I said, it's just another hard drive based portable digital music device, any number of other makes and models of which are perfectly usable in Linux. It is the intentional defects Apple included in the iPod's firmware that make it difficult.
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
Well, the solution is obviously to get rid of iPod style players and move back to the simpler ones that worked just like flash media.
DRM could still function - you could tie the serial number of the player to a key, and put the key in a "magic file" on the drive along with the media files. It just wouldn't be as transparent to the (standard, run of the mill) user. But then the programs that DO it could make it just as transparent. They don't NEED to know what the program is specifically doing.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
When the shit hits the fan I want to be able to open the fan to remove the mess.
Well said.
Sigh
It is perhaps correct to say 'You cannot use the Apple music store under Linux', and call that a Linux shortcoming. (Except, apparently, you can, which really startles me, as I thought iTunes did decryption/reencryption for the device.) It's not one, it is a delibrate Apple business decision not to provide software for Linux, but I can see why, to some people, the distinction doesn't matter.
It is not correct to say that Linux doesn't support the iPod, however, or that's a 'shortcoming'. Linux supports the iPod just fine.
And I did explain it in English. To recap and correct with new knowledge of SharpMusique:
1) If you have music you didn't purchase from Apple, Linux supports everything you want to do it whether it was ripped from CDs or gained from others as mp3s. You can continue to do both those activities under Linux and put the results on your iPod or other MP3 players or play them within Linux.
2) If you have music you did purchase from Apple, you can continue to purchase the music and listen to it on your iPod. However you cannot listen to it within Linux itself. Legally only Apple can provide software and devices to listen to the purchased music, and they haven't done that for Linux. (You also will not be able to play this music on any other MP3 player, regardless of whether you use Linux or not, for the same reason.)
That's it, that should be the whole answer any of this 'under 30' people need. It's not complicated, 95% of the people are purely under 1), and the implication of the article and the probable misquote of ESR is idiotic.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Apple which had only a tiny fraction of the total personal computer market, came out with the iPod which was enormously better than any other mp3 player. When somebody makes something for Linux systems that is enormously better than anything else, then Linux will really take off. As long as producers of Linux hardware and software keep trying to make "just as good as" products, Linux will be a "just as good as" OS. What Linux needs is something that is much better then you can get for any other platform.
Apple supposedly does lets you reset all your authorization"
Yeah, I do it once per year (the allowed maximum). I still somehow manage to swap machines faster than this, though. Well, that, and friends who use my songs.
And the fact you have 'authorization', which means that if all this ever goes away, it will be DiVX all over again, except instead of DVDs you can't play anymore you'll have files you can't decode anymore."
I buy music by the album, then immediately burn it to CD for backup. Worst case scenario, I'll rip it back to MP3. Complain if you'd like about the loss, but I use my iPod in my car with stock speakers. I'll never notice the difference. Your milage will surely vary, but again, I have no complaints and find the whole thing to be quite reasonable.
Sit down child. It's time for some learnin'.
iPod problems on linux aren't screwing the user. They're screwing linux adoption. The user always has the power. They switch to linux. They try their iPod. They user becomes frustrated. The user switches back to their previous os, and never try linux again because "it's teh suck." They are never screwed. They come to "truly appreciate the value of open source and linux" alright. They decide that it's crap, since their stuff isn't supported. It doesn't serve their needs. It's filled with a community of snobbish arrogant people that would rather insult someone rather than get to work fixing an obvious problem. That's the leason they learn.
Let me make that last bit clearer. Your attitude is a problem. Everytime you insult a user. Everytime you serve as an apologist and deny that a problem exists, you are hurting linux. People always have another option. You need to learn that.
And so concludes the leason you need to learn. So stop posing as a l33t h4x0r because you get your rocks off unfucking your wlan card's wpa support, and accepting an ndiswrapper that causes a kernel panic ever three days, and start solving real problems, and become truly l33t.
How to install VLC media player on kubuntu:
.deb packages and how to use apt-get.
.exe or .msi file and double click. Which is not too different from downloading .deb package and using the context menu to install. Of course the difference lies with the number of requisites that it might have. Windows applications would mostly not have any requirement or use .NET in the case of linux dependency hell is something you live with.
.msi.
* Press the K at the bottom that resembles the start menu
* Go to system tools and select Adept package manager.
* Insert your password
* Use the search box to type VLC
* Click the install button
* Start the download and installation progress.
It is not that difficult.
I was able to survive on ubuntu with apt based managers (synaptic / adept) , for those applications that didn't have packages (which are not really for the average user but for the geek that wants to try stuff not from canonical) I just had to investigate the web for installation instructions. I eventually got able to learn how to install
In the case of windows. You download an
But distributions latelly try to come with the most used libraries already installed and the rest of libraries seem to focus on making packages or have people making packages.
But I'd like to state that installation of software in linux is slowly getting less painful. You gotta watch the new installers available that do not use packages but come in the shape of a binary that has a bash script in the top and use an interface to install everything needed. An strategy game called glest used it and it was a lot like just using an
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Yes, the average user would care about DRM, if only they knew what it was. That is why they don't like it when they can't do what they expected to with the music they just thought they got. No one likes defective products. http://defectivebydesign.org/en/join/fsf
No, you still don't get it. Too many choices.
:)
Stop thinking like a geek, stop thinking like someone that reads slashdot, and stop thinking like someone that knows what they're doing and knows what they're looking for.
This is the problem with Linux on the desktop. You think too hard. You think about the interface from the perspective of someone that knows what needs to get done and knows how to do it.
Remember this one thing, and you'll start seeing people come to Linux when you can address it: Most people using computers don't know what they're doing.
When a person installs Linux, or better yet, gets a machine with Linux ON it already, they just want to plug in their iPod and put music on it. That's STEP ONE. Fail at step one, and the person returns the machine or installs something else, unless someone patient is there to help them through the first couple of weeks. Email, web browsing and the iPod. Make those go, and forget just about everything else to start with. People can get work done AT WORK. They want their home machines to do fun, useless things to start. After a week is when they'll start looking for the word processor.
Linux has the unfortunate setback of being different. Windows may suck, but it's familiar territory. People can struggle through it because it's a known quantity. They know that EVENTUALLY they'll get their task done, even if it takes longer or makes no sense.
Summary: you're too smart. Stop it. Think stupid, and we can fix this problem.
(Full disclosure: I used to use Linux but got tired of the hassle years ago. I buy Macs now because I'd rather spend the money than the time. Besides, Quicksilver is possibly the best piece of software I've ever used.
Linux is for when you take the task based approach, where the requirement is for example - "to edit text", but if you take the application based approach "must run MS Word as fast as it can" the requirements really obviously limit your choices. Personally I don't want to shell out for photoshop because I am not a graphics arts professional and a wide variety of other applications can be used to crop and resize images.
True enough, you get a nice desktop all set up at the end of the simple install process, but you still have to enable the universe, multiverse, and the 3rd party PLF repositories (and subsequently select/install the proper set of packages) if you want broad media format and CODEC support. Of course, this can all be automated with EasyUbuntu, though I've had EasyUbuntu fail from time to time.
MRSH-Recording device, corned beef sandwich with kraut, seafaring bird, and the foamy top of a beverage.
There is nothing genius about the iPod, iTunes, etc. Apple made a quality product that had fewer buttons and created a music store that was "relatively" easy to use. Every user of this site knows how easy it is to use apt-get (or equivalent) to get the software to access an iPod or most any other mp3 player. This is not an issue.
We can all bitch about DRM, about how it screws everybody (consumers, musicians, whatever), and it will not change the fundamental fact that the music conglomerates will only release their music with it. The fact that Apple is making decent money off of iTunes is a fair indicator that the public will eventually accept DRM even when they understand the strings attached. We have lost the debate.
With the supposed DRM exclusions in the new GPL (which, I admittedly haven't read, and I could be wrong), Linux will be even less relavant with consumer devices as time goes by. I can tell my kids all about they great music they can download unencumbered and it won't make a goddam bit of difference if they can't get whatever MTV-regurgitated crap is popular that week. Open source needs to deal with DRM, and content protection, in a sane, rational way. It is not enough to say "DRM is bad, DRM is bad". It is reality. People need to seriously evaluate open source DRM projects like Authena and Sun's project, and make a concerted effort to work with the media conglomerates to implement it. It is going to be a hard sell, but maybe not impossible.
Ultimately, it will not matter if my kids can drag-and-drop to their iPod from Linux if the content isn't there.
Linux is ready for the desktop, right now. [...] What it isn't ready for is the MS/Mac zealots, but then, it never will be because they have no desire to change, nor to admit there even is a viable alternative to their favorite OS.
I would say that Linux was ready for the desktop ten years ago, and has become LESS useable since then. I am currently running SuSE 10.1, and while it was slightly easier to install than Slack 2, it's a complete mess as far as user interface goes. The old Unix desktop paradigms have fallen by the wayside, and we are left with a dog's breakfast of Windows conventions slowly strangling the older Unix conventions. Ctrl-C for copy?!? Fucking brilliant. Just killed the the app I was copying from. Should have tried Ctrl-Alt-C in that window. Or not, if it's from an office app that uses it's own clipboard, since you won't actually be copying anything to the clipboard you think you're copying to, and you'll end up pasting some random 5K block of text that you copied from somewhere else an hour before.
Yup, Linux has been ruined by legions of disgruntled Windows users trying to replace their Microsoft shite with something stable. Thanks to their tireless efforts, we've now got Winux. All the badly designed shite that drives you crazy on Windows, but hey at least now it's stable and secure. Fortunately you can still get yourself back to a somewhat consistent Unixy environment after a couple of days of abolishing the atrocities of KDE, Gnome, Firefox, and assorted other crap, but since all the developer effort is going into making that crap even crappier to appeal to the next wave of disgruntled Windows refugees, I don't hold much hope for real advancement in the Linux UI realm.
Fortunately Apple stepped up to the plate, and provided a genuinely revolutionary step forward in Unix UIs. A lot of us have quietly walked away from Linux desktops in the last 5 years because of Apple. Linux servers are still the shit, so I'm still a fan, but the Linux desktop is hopelessly lost, and IMO has been since Redhat 4 shipped with fvwm95 as the default window manager.
don't you need to install iTunes in order to put music on your iPod in windows? (I don't have an iPod, so I don't know for sure). Windows is just as poor for "it just works", the only difference is that companies will give you a CD with windows drivers on it
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
"Except what they're talking about here is not another piece of "every bit of hardware in existance", it's the single most popular music player on the market, and probably the most ubiquitous peripheral out there right now."
A lot of peripherals are bundled with the computer, but they're still peripherals. CD/DVD drives probably outnumber iPods 10,000 to 1.
I plugged in my iPod to my iBook running Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 to change the batter -- guess what? Rhythmbox came up, with the iPod there. I doubled clicked on a song, and it played.
fak3r.com
Defective-by-design? That 75% market share says otherwise. But hey, enjoy your "Archos Gmini."
"Sufferin' succotash."
All of that can be done with plug-ins (my iTunes automatically grabs lyrics for every song, which appear on my iPod on the next sync), and iTunes doesn't phone home unless you specifically tell it to. Skinning is a disaster for any app, and every Winamp theme I've ever seen has been a retina-burning, psychedelic experience that left me with the need for diapers.
And nobody cares about Ogg.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I truly dislike iPods. I own a generic 1Gb s1mp3 player, and a sony mp3 walkman. Between the two of they share my every requirement.
On the desktop usablity, tho, I would like to see a distro without a gui in which the shell has voice recognition and a parser or some other way to easily find out which command you're supposed to be using. I love the linux cli, and think that it should be all you need to see.
"Computer, tell me the time"
COMPUTER:~# date - print or set the system date and time
"Affirmative"
COMPUTER:~# Fri Aug 18 16:02:13 NZST 2014
Key here would be a FS in which all changes are reversible. A hypothetical ext4fs, where the 4 denotes a journal that also stores when each file was deleted, etc, and overwrites only the oldest bytes. Or something; I'm not real technical.
Linux has maintained it's high quality because it doesn't cater to consumers.
Take the white suppository, and I'll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes...
The software comes with a CD, yes. Like I said, this is familiar territory to people. CD goes in the drive, the installation process starts, you hit return a bunch, and you're done. Familiarity -- or lack thereof -- is a hurdle Linux has to overcome, no matter how good it is.
Buy a Mac... that's what this is all about *nix stability with a nice GUI that works, right?
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
These settings have worked well for me.
fullscreen video:
ffmpeg -vcodec xvid -b 300 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 96 -i input.mpeg -s 320x240 -aspect 4:3 output.mp4
Widescreen (such as a DVD source):
ffmpeg -vcodec xvid -b 300 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 96 -i input.mpeg -s 320x190 -aspect 4:3 output.mp4
===========
I use gtkpod for my music management, and GPixPod when I want to throw some photos on my pod. Rythmbox for the occasional podcast.
I like Rockbox. The quality of playback and the crossfading is nice. Volume can go higher than apple will allow using Rockbox. Themes are nice too. I don't like how it alphabetizes the track listings of an album. There's no simple way to make playback follow the ID3 track order. No video support either, so I dual boot my ipod between standard firmware and Rockbox quite a bit.
Fuck the Zune.
Sounds like you failed at installing debian (known for hard installs and bad post-install configs) and are blaming all linux for your stupidity in A) needing to rtfm and B) picking the wrong distro.
If you are having THAT MUCH of a hard time, get mandrake, red hat or some other noob linux. Don't run out and pick the most hard to use one and whine when it doesn't put a help link on every button.
Great Intellect...
Unplugging iPod without unmounting it first does usually not cause any problems on Tiger. You can be updating the songs in that moment, you can add arbitrary files on the drive: No problems will arise in about 98 of 100 cases. Of course: if iTunes was writing to the Database-File while you pull the plug (you have to be verry lucky to be fast enough) you have to sync the device again.
Is this different on Linux?
Nobody cares about Ogg my ass! Plenty of "normal" people use it, and more and more video games are starting to use Vorbis (partly due to saving money on the MP3 patent licensing fees). Vorbis has been proven to be of much higher quality than MP3 (usually found to be on par with AAC) in the same size of a file, and it's IMNSHO a much more awesome name than "MP3".
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
"Today's young generation can use Linux on the desktop provided it works with their iPod. Linux on the desktop still hasn't reached that stage"
1) I use linux on the desktop
2) I sync my ipod with that
In addition, I use Amarok in conjuntion with last.fm instead of iTunes.
Easily the best music player out there.
A lot of people are kicking balls. Linux needs people to shoot and score.
Open source gurus at LinuxWorld discuss solutions to make Linux more consumer-friendly.
This statement is just as relevant now as it was back in, say, 1998...
Linux zealots are far too forgiving when judging the difficultly of Linux configuration issues and far too harsh when judging the difficulty of Windows configuration issues.
I have a mix of machines here at the house. I have a couple Win 2K machines, a XP machine and a 98 and 95 machine.
I have a couple HP printers. They were placed on the network using Hawking Printservers. All windows machines except the XP box required drivers to be installed to connect. The XP box and the Ubuntu box simply used IPP protocol with no additional drivers required.
I have a Cannon flatbed scanner. The windows machines required drivers. The Ubuntu machine only required the XSine Image Scanner application to be installed. I prefer to use the Ubuntu machine to scan. The program gives a color histogram in addition to the basic features provided by the factory TWAIN driver. Very nice if you need to touch up color balance on an old print.
Why do I have such a mix of machines?
The days of a general purpose machine is over.
The The Windows 95 machine is used for the MIDI stuff I do. It is a laptop with a max of 72 Meg of EDO memory. It runs my keyboard applications just fine with it's built in Joystick/MIDI port. I haven't found a suitable replacement. I also use it with the GPS for Geocaching. It is the lowest power laptop I have.
The wife uses the XP machine. It's hers and she guards it as she does not like to lose her email on the next rebuild due to some malware someone would manage to acquire for her.
The kids machine ran 98 for a while, required rebuilt within 4 months. They like myspace and sites like it. Tried Win2k with them running as limited users instead of administrator along with a current install of Norton. It became slower than my Windows 95 laptop within 8 weeks. What a shame. It has the fastest processor in the house. It got rebuilt with Ubuntu as soon as Daper Drake came out. No issues. The hardest thing was to install flash. It needed installed from the command line and I managed it as a complete novice. The only thing I haven't figured out yet is how to get edit privilages to the \etc directory so I can edit the hosts file. Given time, I will find out. The advertisements are an annoyance only.
I will say that Microsoft Powerpoint is nicer to use than Openoffice Presentation. So please don't put me down as a Microsoft basher. I haven't found how to adjust photo brightness, contrast and resise while maintaining aspect ratio of photos in OpenOffice Presentation. Maybe it's a learning curve thing, or maybe the features just are not there.
Overall, Ubuntu installed and found more hardware with the least amount of searching for drivers of all the machines I have here except the XP box which came with the drivers installed in the image software except for the additional hardware added later.
I needed to scan a bunch of pages to fax. My W2K laptop locked up 3 times while scanning 28 pages. I moved over to the Ubuntu machine and finished the remainder of the job with the same scanner. No glitches.
The truth shall set you free!
Well, it's not friendly to first post trolls perhaps.
Not friendly to anyone who can't do a Google search. My kids got a genuine I-Pod. The machine I provided them has Ubuntu Daper Drake. I gathered from Google that the Banchee Music player supports the I-Pod except for the DRM stuff. In addition to sending music to the player, it can upload from the player. It that respect it's better than I-Tunes for my kids. Installing it was a snap. On the menu bar I selected Applications. On the pull down I selected Add/Remove. This brought up a list of installed applications and a list of applications that can be installed. Under Audio I selected the Banchee Music Player and let it install after providing the administrator password.
My kids do not have software install privilages which keeps the cruft and malware at bay.
Instead of having to go to each vendor's website to get and install applications, it is nice to simply to have an Add/Remove item with everyting there. Nice! It is kind of like using Microsoft Updates, but for your applications instead of just security updates.
The truth shall set you free!
I don't want my Linux "consumer" friendly. I want it hacker friendly. And it is. So *whack* hands off! There are some great usability things in the works that, when implemented, probably will make things more consumer friendly. Fine. Just please don't let that be the goal.
i ng-drm-money-maker-thought-stealer running either. Such things are for consumers.
The tipping point for Linux was when Oracle decided to support it? That was enough to stop reading, but unfortunatly I continued on.
The more windows consumer users are attracted to Linux the more they will expect it to function like windows. I want new users. I want fresh thinkers. I don't want cube fodder bugging my OS. I don't want a dancing paper clip in the corner. I don't want a mega-media-super-duper-everything-all-in-one-amaz
I am a happy consumer. I consume quite a bit actually. Linux is my escape from consumerism. Yet again we see a counter-culture wanting to be mainstream.
I am not a zealot at all, I just would like to propose the question: What do you want Linux to be? The everything OS? Best Desktop/Server/Embedded/Big Iron system?
I don't mind using Windows for some things, but the second that Windows and Linux start working and acting the same - forget it.
Well...
I'v Used just Lnux at home for over 10 years. I recently added Windows, and I do enjoy he fact that almost any device (not just Ipods) will work out of the box with my XP machine.
So my latest machine has not been converted to Linux, and won't be.
It's just a matter of what you like to to to achieve what goal. On Linux, having a new toy alwais means tinkering. I actually like tinkering, but I want to chose when to tinker and when to play...
I still have a Linux Box around (And a Minix 3 box these days) for tinkering, and XP because it gives me good fucntionality.
But maybe it's just me....
I'm young(ish), and I got my iPod to work on amarok. I download my podcasts through amarok and sync it up daily. No, it's not as easy as Windows or Mac, but amarok does default to syncing without deleting tracks that aren't on the hard drive. Amarok can 'rip' tracks off my iPod and add them to my HD's library. And amarok is free (not shareware or nagware or crackware like all of the Windows/Mac rippers I've been able to find). It was worth the two extra minutes of setup, and I can't imagine that the setup process would beguile any relatively computer-literate person, many of which happen to be: young iPod owners.
I started using linux six months ago. There are a couple things that keep a windows kernel in my boot menu at home (ok, just age of empires and Traktor DJ studio), but ipod compatibility is not one of them. Grandma (or her young, equally non-technical equivalent, whoever that is) doesn't need to be able to install and sync ipods to every single OS candidate on the market. The market comprises more than just Grandma.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
The whole mp3 craze exsits *because* there is no DRM on those files and because they are easy to share.
It doesn't matter what itunes or any other drm encumbered offering does, it's still just a tiny part of the whole music-as-files world.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
"mp3 players are usb mass storage and require no software...."
MP3 is a file format that has nothing to do with USB, and doesn't require a computer as an intermediate link. A system that used pre-recorded cassettes with MP3 files on them would be an MP3 player because it was _playing MP3 files_ -- that's what defines an MP3 player, not USB or any other interface. iPods are clearly capable of _playing MP3 files_, so this by definition makes them MP3 players.
"retards buy retarded devices i guess"
Retards also make stupid statements about MP3 players being something other than things that play MP3 files.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
"And nobody cares about Ogg."
You mean that *you* don't care about Ogg, and don't really know anyone who does, and perhaps can't personally think of good reasons why anyone should.
By that high standard, your average person could cheerfully assert that "nobody cares about Linux" or "nobody cares about network security" or "nobody cares about the SCO lawsuit".
So, next time a user compromises network security because of a post-it with their password on it, remember: nobody cares, so what are you getting so irate about?
I wonder whether any of these "when will Linux be ready for the desktop" people have actually used it. Linux music players come pre-installed on all major distros and desktops, and, out of the box, can talk to iPod, and can even share music with iTunes. WTF else do people want?
Well you can wake me up when iTunes displays song lyrics on the fly, pulls up Wikipedia entries on the artist, sorts music in a sane manner, does not phone home on your music collection for an "enhanced" buying experience, is fully skinable so you can get rid of that 1900 Ford mentality of "They can have it look however they want as long as it is this shitty minimalist skin", and supports ALL the music file formats i want to use like .ogg
Oh, hell, wake *me* up when iTunes lets you just plug an iPod into the machine, drag and drop the songs you want on it from your filesystem onto an icon for the device, unplug the iPod, and start playing the songs.
That's how every other hardware MP3 player works. That's how every other software media player works. But not iTunes. iTunes wants you to create a library, drag and drop the files into the library, then drag them from the library to the iPod. I mean why?
When I switched to Linux back in the past century, it was nowhere nearly as nice and polished as it is now and I went from 100% NT fan boi to 100% Free Software in a couple of months.
I set up my machine to dual boot, but in the end I think I booted windows less than 10 times after I installed Linux and after a year of disuse I nuked NT.
Granted, I've never been a big gamer so that made the switch easy, but just about every single application I used on windows had an equivalent or better replacement on Linux.
What was even more impressive was the huge amount of exelent documentation that was available, compared to almost nothing on windows.
I guess my needs were simply better suited for Linux that most peoples, because for me switching was not only easy, but downright pleasant.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Or I can watch streaming video in RealPlayer and. . . listen to MP3s. Xine works just fine with DVDs. I'm not even using the latest and greatest Linux distro, I had those capabilities as of Fedora Core 2 and use them just fine in FC3. And I can watch almost all WMV and QT files. (I assume the ones I can't view are in exotic codecs) To watch proprietary video formats, download and install w32codecs.
Admittedly, I have yet to get gstreamer to work, though to my shock, XMMS started playing back mp3s when I installed w32codecs.
The thing to remember with Linux multimedia is. . . the applications won't work on every machine, if one doesn't work on your box after a reasonable amount of screwing around, try something else.
However, the fact that this stuff generally doesn't work out of the box is in large part why I don't recommend Linux unless it's in an environment where it can get tech support. If you are your own tech support, fine. But for typical users, this stuff needs to be set up by admins.
Tech Public Policy stuff
That is kind of odd... at my job I have to swap hardware in and out of Windows boxes all the time. Typically Windows just starts up in a VGA mode if you're using a different card than the last one you booted with. It does suck that I have to reinstall the driver even if I am using a card covered by the same driver as the previous one, but I've never had it fail to get to a mode where I could do the push-button driver install.
The way X works on my computer at home I'm pretty sure it would refuse to start X without a card covered by the same driver installed, but it's very likely that Ubuntu makes some attempt to detect what card you're using. Which is nice.
Ubuntu works with iPods out of the box, and you can use Amarok 1.4 to upload tracks flawlessly - even podcasts.
:-D
The only things you can't do are paid-for-tracks and video (although don't quote me on the last one) - but so damn what? I don't want their crappy encrypted rubbish, and I only have a 4G ipod anyway
as a user of windows as my primary OS, and a user of gentoo as my secondary OS, i have a few was on how to make linux more user friendly:
1. kill off X, write something new, something that isnt from the stone age
2. centralise the desktop effort, instead of everyone doing their own little project to improve 1 bit, all work on the same project and work on 1 bit each, making a better product at the end.
the thing is, X is older than the universe its self, and its had hack after hack to try and make it better as needs and time goes on, but, its just a big hack ontop of a big hack now, something new needs to be done, from the ground up. and it needs to be built as a desktop, not as a gui server. thats what makes the windows desktop what it is, its just there, on that machine, you dont need to be messing around with remote access with X when you have something like VNC or RDP.
when linux has a fast, responcive and friendly GUI system and desktop, then that is what will make linux a good desktop OS.
portfolio
foobar2k
nobody's perfect
And Quod Libet. Nuff said. Are these guys mad? And how are we supposed to take seriously the opinions of a website called redherring.com?
Sheesh.
No, seriously, what he meant was that nobody who matters cares about Ogg.
um, ok so i was drunk when i posted that lol
.m3u files so playlists really arent that hard to manage, oh well, if i find a larger sized usb mass storage player thats simple and requires no software at all to use all the features, i'll buy it, until then ill have to settle with as little as 20GB in my pocket...
but im still right, until the ipod i never heard of a non usb-mass storage player
if your going to winge about support for proprietry devices being a bit sketchy dont buy them
personally im very happy with my iRiver iHP-120 from years ago, 20GB, USB mass storage, it works wonderfully with all audio sockets including optical in and optical out, and can record from optical to MP3 on the device itself
all it lacks is a playlist, sadly the firmware has been disbanded and im not willing to install the experimental user-made firmware, luckily it reads
You might want to try iPodLinux on it instead. Then you can do a lot of things not supported by Apple, like playing OGG files. If you need the original Apple functionality, it is available by holding down some button during boot/reset, in essence making it a dual-boot system.
As someone who wrote Java programs professionally, the write-once-run-anywhere hype is just that, hype. Even now, Java apps don't look or run the same between OS X, Windows and Linux.
And as someone who writes Linux device drivers for a living, I assure you my problems with DVDs were a lot deeper than the pseudo encryption.
Standards are only the "key" if everyone standardizes their hardware, too. Which, come to think of it, is the main advantage of Macs.
Clear, Dark Skies
"Nobody cares about Ogg my ass! Plenty of "normal" people use it"
.DOC and .PPC files, i.e. without knowing or caring what it is because the OS combined with applications programs manages everything for them automatically. If you don't think that this is the case, then try asking a random iPod owner what the difference between AAC and MP4 is, or someone who uses Outlook everyday in their job about PPC files, what they're used for, and where Windows keeps them.
In the same way they use AAC, WMA, or for that matter
"more and more video games are starting to use Vorbis"
And games are written by -- yes, you've guessed it: PROGRAMMERS. Question of the day: what is the overall percentage of the computer-using public that develops games? How many of the people at whom such games are targeted know or care that Vorbis is being used? How many give a hoot about any of a game's file formats? In the sort of statistics that the company marketing a game will use for market research, all of these figures are close enough to zero that they will be lost in the error factor of their sampling methods, hence the fact that ads for games don't tend to harp on at length about what formats are used for each type of file.
The reality of of the matter is quite simply that people are largely oblivious of file formats in general, and not Ogg-Vorbis in particular, thus Windows' default view not showing file suffixes, but putting a little icon next to entries telling people what they're used for (music, video, WP document, etc.), together with any relevant metadata that describes them, and Apple using a similar system both in OS X and the iXXX apps which ship with it. People watch TV without knowing or caring about how the transmitter encodes sound, video, and colour information, and listen to FM radio without worrying about how the two stereo channels are encoded, so the fact that they also listen to music on their computers and portable players without even thinking about how the particular bit patterns that get turned into sound happen to be organised isn't particularly surprising.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
On windows, if you don't have IDE drives, the installed for the Via 4-in-1 driver fails 100% of the time. There is no other way of getting their drivers on a Windows machine.
Oh bugger.
Works on Linux (mainly because I don't have to use Via's installer).
It turns out that you need to have IDE turned on in the BIOS for installation. But Via had to say this, there is no way of finding out from the system or install routine.
I've been an Amarok developer for 3 years, and I'd like to comment.
;)
Amarok beats iTunes in quite a few ways; eg. wikipedia artist-lookup, lyrics lookup, suggesting music from you collection for you to play next, last.fm integration, cover downloads, playback formats supported, etc. Certainly we have every feature iTunes has except a music store. And we have patches to allow purchases from Magnatune sitting on the mailing list.
We aren't as simple as iTunes. Out interface shines in some areas, like our drag and drop focus, simple toolbars and browser metaphor, but is hacked together and complex in other areas. In many ways this is a symptom of open source development, but we do have a focus on making our interface easy to learn and uncluttered, and I'm sure this has helped us to become popular on Linux.
At the end of the day iTunes is targeted at different people. Can a music player that supports multiple audio backends and multiple database backends ever be as simple as one that comes with them built in and mostly unconfigurable? Yes, you can hide that stuff in an options dialog. But no you'll still have a system that is more difficult to make bug-free, and that has more potential for strange behaviour.
If you put the time in, Amarok beats everything else out there; we've put the time in to ensure that. But it isn't there yet, in terms of catering to the iTunes demographic. And I'm not sure we really want to do that anyway.
If anything our focus for Amarok 2 makes us even less like iTunes, and perhaps not in a general appeal kind of way. But if you like music, and have a lot of it, you'll love Amarok 2. It's not ready yet though..
Moron. Repeat after me. here's how you install linux. Insert CD. Hit enter till it loads. For 95% of all modern instalations, that's it. Installing windows is more complicated than this, I swear. It's just that most people never install windows. Also, here's how integrating my ipod worked in ubuntu: connect iPod. ta-da.
On the other hand, Windows won't even *read* your ext2, ext3, reiserfs, jfs, hpfs or xfs partitions, despite full (i.e. read/write) open specs and open reference implementations being available for *all* of them.
Until windows can do this, I don't see how anyone can claim that it's ready for the desktop either.
Heck, MS isn't even *working* on support for any of them, which is a hell of a lot less than can be said for the guys who are working on NTFS for linux. Or are you setting a double-standard here?
Vorbis has been proven to be of much higher quality than MP3 (usually found to be on par with AAC) in the same size of a file
Proven? I love the concept of ogg vorbis (even bought a pretty expensive iAudio player because it handles both ogg and flac) and did some quite extensive tests using my quite good headphones (AKG K501) and stereo (Rotel amps, TDL speakers). I encoded Mike Watt's Contemplating the Engine Room, which has beautiful solo e-bass lines, into ogg vorbis (oggenc) and mp3 (lame) in various quality settings.
To be honest, all of them sucked. The harmonics simply vanished to a large degree. Yes, the base frequencies were still there, the instrument didn't disappear, you could still follow the notes. But the specific sound of the instrument, which is created by the harmonics, was gone. I now encode in flac. People who say that they can't tell the difference between mp3 and CD don't know what to listen for (harmonics, spatial information), don't know how the instruments actually sounds in the first place, or listen to music that can do without the fine details.
But: while lame lost the harmonics, oggenc also added a nasty hiss, even at the highest quality setting. (And this setting makes the use of a lossy format pretty questionable, as it is not that much smaller than flac.)
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Seeing as wheels are stone-age technology.
X is amply sufficient: otherwise why would UT2004 play faster with the same GeForce drivers under X11 than under Windows GDI?
I have all my music in mp3's in a PC with FC4 ext3 filesystem with monthly crontab mirror backup.
But the front end is a mac-mini with OSX which connects to the music via NFS and services my i-pod.
Also I have another front end, a laptop with Windows XP that connects via samba and services anothe i-pod.
If I like a song, I buy the used CD and rip it in mp3 VBR using Linux grip.
I know that 20 years down the road there's a pretty good chance I will want to hear
PF "Careful with that Axe Eugene"
I don't know what app or what what OS or what music player is going to do it.
But what I know is that neither Apple or Microsoft or Sony or EMI will decide
or monitor what I do with MY MUSIC!
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
that if you're going to attempt to be a Linux apologist, you should try and actually help the folks who are having problems, rather than insisting that they are the problem. The GP is right, I come across this attitude all the time. Indeed, when I first installed Linux a couple years ago, I did it despite the general community of obnoxious "you are so not the haxor"-geeks, not because of them.
There are two side to this: the clueless noobs who want Linux to be just like Windows (which means, essentially, self-configuring or trivially configurable) and the self-proclaimed Linux Uber-geeks, who insist that everyone should be able to figure out obscure, undocumented command-line configurations by trial and error. This is a problem both with Linux itself and with many applications written for Linux.
I really like Linux. I have a Fedora box running at work, a Ubuntu box at home, and another box at home waiting to be converted to some other distro. Nevertheless, the truth is that Linux is not (generally speaking) as easy to use as Windows in terms of either hardware or software configuration. Until we admit that this is a problem for widespread adoption, it's going to continue to be difficult to convince people that Linux is just as good as Windows even though we know that in many ways it is actually even better. One way to make this better (aside from actually coding things to be easier to work with) is to offer support to people who are interested in using Linux.
New users are turned off when they attempt to dip a toe into the waters of Linux and discover that not only is the water much colder than they are used to, but there are obnoxious children splashing everyone, insisting that the water is warm and it's the new user that's the wrong temp.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
If 75% of the public likes a broken product that doesn't make it any less broken. Most of the public is still using Internet Explorer, too, remember. :-)
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
"Apple puts out a proprietary, defective-by-design consumer electronics product and won't port the required software to platforms other than Mac OS or Windows and it's somehow a Linux shortcoming?"
It's not a Linux shortcoming, but it is an obstacle that Linux devs will have to overcome if they want to reach that demographic. The argument I'm hearing is that companies that have locked their users into proprietary software are at fault. I totally agree with that. However, you're not going to convince "Joe Average" or "Grandma Betsy" to switch to Linux by giving them a 30 minute lecture on how their digital rights are being violated by proprietary formats and DRM. In fact, the average user probably would never switch unless they have had a horrible personal experience with the OS they are currently running.
So what are the options?
1. Multi million dollar ad campaigns that make Linux seem like the coolest thing since Vanilla Ice.
2. Cater to the masses and make Linux run just like its competitors.
3. Sabotage Windows and Mac machines to increase hatred for the competing OSes.
Or you could forget about trying to get people to switch to Linux and just develop for the love of developing. Isn't that why most people do it anyway?
Here's the procedure for ripping a CD in itunes:
- Insert CD to your CD drive, close tray if necessary.
- Start ITunes. Wait a moment while Itunes detects the CD in the drive.
- If connected to the internet, Itunes will (by default, at least) try to look up the CD information via the Gracenote CDDB service.
- ITunes should have automatically opened the playlist corresponding to your newly inserted CD. Now you can adjust file/artist/etc. info *if* and as you see fit. (Importing 800+ CDs, I had to adjust maybe 20 of them... for the most part, it "just works" to find the CD information. Your mileage may vary.)
- Click the "Import CD" button to... you know, import the CD.
- (???)
- Profit!
ITunes imports with your choice of NON-DRM'ed formats. The only way it attaches DRM to the track is IFF you buy & download it from the Itunes Music Store. If you don't buy from ITMS, you don't get DRM. And if you made the mistake of buying from ITMS, it's not that hard to strip the DRM off -- burn the tracks to a CD, and re-rip them to your hard drive. I'll grant that that's a time-consuming & expensive proposition if you've purchased more than a dozen or so tracks from ITMS, but it *does* remove the FairPlay restrictions on the track, so if you find yourself desperately looking for a way out of ITMS, that's probably the simplest way out.I've ripped, as I mentioned, somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 CDs to an external hard drive, and have been easily able to take those files and play them anywhere else on any other system equipped to play mp3 audio. ITunes may not be as feature-rich as Amarok, but it is certainly not the DRM-laden nightmare most make it out to be.
So, in summary: ITUNES + YOUR CDS != DRM LOCK-UP. Only downloads from the ITMS are locked up that way, and it's just about as simple as can be to import CDs using Itunes -- insert cd, edit info, click a button, and you're done. (And, incidentally, in Itunes preferences, you can actually set it to automatically rip & eject any audio CD you insert into the drive, in case clicking a button is too much work.)
And every other mp3 player gets hosed by the iPod in sales... wonder why that might be?
Of course once you are done railing on Apple (and yes I think they deserve some criticism for not making the iPod a standard USB drive and letting the iPod import the songs itself into it's database) take a look at YamiPod. It runs on Windows, MacOSX and Linux and is a self contained binary (no real install needed) that will import your songs for you. I formatted my ipod to FAT32 by connecting it to a windows laptop from work with iTunes and iPod Update installed on it, but with the newer ones this step isn't needed as they are all FAT32 now) then accessed it like a regular drive, dropped all 3 versions of YamiPod on it and now I can import and export songs from it on any machine I want.
I've talked to a few people who I would term tech savvy rather than computer savvy. They know the latest technology ie ipods, DVD recorders, youtube but they're not computer savvy. They know how to connnect these to computers but they don't know how to rip CDs or edit DVD's on the PC without pushing a few buttons. This may be an argument to make Linux more accessible but IMHO, I can't see them converting to linux, MS, whether you like it or not, is a brand, it is a philisophy of being able to doing something with a few clicks. Linux can never or should emulate that if it hopes it becomes mainstream. It just will never happen, the MS brand is too strong.
Considering that the main repository contains an old version of amarok that routinely ruins my itunesDB (and I haven't, for the life of me, figured out how to switch to the "unstable" branch of the repository), it was quite a trip to figure out how to make it work.
I still had to format it a couple of times using itunes on a borrowed windows comp, which was not fun either.
Gtkpod is merely flaky and confusing, but at least works reliably.
It honestly made me want to go back to gentoo, where you had written howtos, and explicit ways on how to get the latest versions. Of course, that's like cutting off your left arm to save fingers on your right hand, if that makes any sense.
*grumbles
That's not the point, dipshit. 75% of DAPs are iPods. Linux people want more users. See a reason for wanting iTunes on Linux?
The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers
Screw Itunes drm stuff, I just want a player for gnome that has an equalizer and a itunes like interface. Is that so hard?
Well said; I actually agree, for the most part.
:-)
My responses on this thread have not been so much from the perspective of trying to get people to switch to Linux or stop using iPods.
It's been more along the lines of addressing the big misconception that iPods not working with Linux out of the box is somehow a Linux shortcoming, because of Apple's deliberate design decisions.
If you ask me, iPods don't "work" on Windows or Mac OS either. They're broken no matter what platform you plug one into.
That's why I didn't buy one. That's also why my wife (a Mac user) probably won't get another one.
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
Windows users should be used to this. They allready knew the BSOD, now they can meet the Black SOD. And in the near future, they might even aggree that the RSOD might be the worst of all. ;-)
Come on now, if you install linux the first thing you'll likely learn about is using a package manager. A normal person who installs linux will at least take the time to find out how software is installed. A normal person from your definition ("most people") will probably let someone else do the install for them, and they can ask those people to find an iPod program for them. If they don't know anyone who is at the very least slightly knowledgeable with linux, they just won't bother.
That is keeping linux more from adoption then anything else. The attitude of "but everyone uses windows so...". This approach is quite rational; even if windows gives you lots of trouble you still have several people you could ask for help. If you're looking for a good program to do something, chances are you know someone who can get it for you. On the other hand, with linux's low penetration you're not likely to know many people who use it and can help you with any problems.
(GNU/)Linux as a software platform is IMHO quite ready for the desktop, it's just not beyond the stage of early adopters in this area.
Cause they've got a bigger marketing budget, and because they were the first to make the idea fashionable.
Nothing to do with quality of the product, if that's what you're implying.
Look, if you have not used Linux in the last couple of years say so, it is fine, we will understand.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You patronize the previous poster for being patronizing. Go figure.
But Linux adoption is not and end to itself.
If people do not have the spine to use stuff that respects their rights (DRM contravenes fair use and makes difficult to assert your fith to full ownership of music you buy) do not blame in people that have got a clue.
Next thing you will suggest is that democratic countries should become a bit more repressive so people used to be repressed feel at home.
If you want to be free you have to pay a price, in the case of sofware the price may be conveneince (and here, this is becoming a non issue, I have used Linux as my desktop for 10 years and have found ways to make for the relatively inconvenience of using something not so popular).
What you describe as an attitude problem is simply to stand for your principles.
The mainstream users should in this case wisen up or be screwed, Linux, FLOSS and principles can't be bnet in order to accomadate an ignorant, masochist, majority.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Look, iTunes used to run in OSX only.
It did not run in Windows.
According to your reasoning that was a Windows shortcoming.
Now wiseguy, pray do tell us who fixed this shortcomming?
Was it MS?
Nope. IT was Apple Computers Inc.
So put the blame where it belongs. iTunes does not run in Linux because Apple don't want it to. Those are the culprit party, not the Linux comunity.
iPods work perfectly fine in Linux btw, there is plenty of software out there that allows you to transparently drap and drop MP3 files in your iPod (without doing any modifications to the music player).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... you deserve to be abused by the companies that should be serving you.
Fortunately there are enough people that care about the particulars that Linux and FLOSS in general are now taken seriously in the press, the media and the corps that matter. The general public will follow sooner or later.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It is simply impossible to listen to all that music in lifetime, and it is an exercise of futility to hoard it all if you will never use most of it....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I've been using Gentoo Linux for almost a year now. Got an iPod at christmas, and iPod support does exist in linux. Amarok has had iPod support since version 1.4.0, and the transcode plugin helps to convert from any format (most of my collection is ogg) to a compressed m4a. It automatically converts to this format when needed, or all the time if you really want to pack your ipod to the brim.
wait, so you're telling me that people are still using this linux thing? man, how persistent. give up already.. the war is over.
This probably didn't come with your distribution and it not very well known, so I'm not blaming you at all... But captive-ntfs has allowed full NTFS read write access for a while now. It's pretty easy to setup too.
If it's no on fire, it's a hardware problem.
Bring me games to Linux and Vista will go away.
Wouldn't that require Vista to be *here*?
Yes, yes, and Linux sucks because it doesn't run Duke Nukem Forever.
Who cares if Java programs don't look the same on different OSs? Are you one of those people who say everything has to look like Windows XP?
Oh. My. Have you ever even used more than one operating system? Are you vaguely aware that OS X has a different user interface model from Gnome or KDE or, *gasp*, Windows? Do you have any awareness at all of how disruptive it is for an end user when one application puts it's menu bar in the "wrong" place or doesn't use the "right" keyboard short cuts?
You know, for someone who's off on a standards rant, you sure have little understanding of what actually goes into making something cross-platform compatible.
Clear, Dark Skies
You must have some incredibly stupid users if they can't even figure out that a program is using different keyboard shortcuts or puts widgets in different places. Inconvienent, yes, but it shouldn't be such a big problem. So you're telling me if they tried to drive in a different car, they couln't do it unless it had the exact same layout? Any idiot could figure it out even if the brake and gas were swapped. At least things are labeled on a computer and it won't crash into anything or blow up. You might loose something important, but Bill Gates proved no one cares about that (and backups help a little)
Not to mention the fact usability doesn't have anything to do with compatiblity, which is what I was talking about.
Also, said problem coulod be easily resolved by making the standard more generic. Why should the programmers be placing menus and buttons anyway? If they go into a standarized place, then the toolkit should handle it.
Try Rockbox...http://www.rockbox.org/
Ban Engadget - moderators censor comments!
Who the hell would want to pay for music when you can get it free off of Limewire or Frostwire? Man, some people are stupid...
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
Okay. With this attitude you've got, I'm going to guess that you aren't even out of school yet.
Here's a hint: you aren't going to hold down a job very long by telling your users that they're stupid simply because you don't like the idea of following user interface guidelines.
Clear, Dark Skies
Well, it looks like banshee is getting one http://i-nz.net/2006/07/16/the-banshee-equalizer/
but it does seem stupid that this kind of feature hasn't appeared yet until now. I'd personally like to see some very simplistic bass and treble controls, preferably in the style of twidly knobs, introduced to a GNOME music player in addition to the option of a graphic equalizer.
Software Freedom Day!.
I noticed that requires the xine backend, not gstreamer. Proving yet again that gstreamer is just not useful.
I, too, use FLAC at all possible times, but transcoding to Vorbis for an MP3 player seems to work well for when space is tight and Rockbox is available.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I tried them all, compared them to The tools available on Windows 9Itunes and the shareware available). Moved to my Windows machine for my Ipod, it just works nicer...
"works out of the box on distro X" is a myth by the way, that should be "works out of the box if you ahve exactly the right hardware", and of course, once you ironed out all the other little anoyances....
Nop Linux not ready for the masses, not even the beloved "Distro "