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Apple Cuts Off Linux iPod Users
Will Fisher writes "New iPods will no longer be able to work with Linux. iTunes now writes some kind of hash (SHA1, md5?) to the iPod database which new iPods check against. If this check fails then the iPod reports that it contains 0 songs. This appears to be protection against 3rd party applications writing out their own databases. We haven't found out how to generate our own valid hashes (but we do know the hash includes the database itself, and possibly the iPod serial number), and are looking for help."
good thing rockbox will continue to present a normal mass storage device that's about 300x easier to perform simple file operations with than iTunes.
I agree but that does not make me any less pissed that they did it. They should know that Linux users are a chunk of the market. If they want to keep their interface so closed they should make an iTunes for Linux. Hell, OS X is unix. Is it THAT damn hard? At lest give us a closed source binary lib to talk to the iPod.
..unsolicited, and while its a cool device, that proprietary format sucks. I have a massive CD collection ripped sitting on a shared drive, and everytime she wants something she has to let Itunes convert it and store another copy of the song.
I think apple makes dealing with existing collections difficult so you are pushed to buy from their store. In my case, it pushes me away from buying IPods.
No, that would be Steve Jobs that has his head up there, not Apple as a company.
Remember, they kicked him out once before. I think its past time to do it again.
He has his place at starting 'insanely great ideas', then he needs to get the hell out of the way, which he cant seem to do.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I tried iTunes a couple of years ago, and it was lame, but workable. I tried it again just last week, and it is now completely unusable.
What is the first thing you want to do with a music player? Put some music on it. Well, there's no easy way to do this in iTunes. You have to build a music library by searching disk. What do you do if you move from one storage network to another? Uninstall iTunes, reinstall, and search the new disk space? What do you do if you add some tracks to disk? There's no obvious incremental search. Drag-n-drop did nothing. Searching menus was fruitless.
Sorry, for all of their supposed ease of use, in the monomaniacal pursuit of iTunes store sales, they've rendered their players useless as shipped. The only reasonable thing to do with my ipod is to flash it with a basic MP3 player firmware. There are several for this purpose. Then you can use it like any other USB drive. Dragndrop, OS-neutral.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Also, it's not always a bad thing to be in a niche market, as long as the niche is big enough and margins are good.
It sucks if you're someone who bought said Macintosh, and there's one short aisle of software for sale for your Mac in the BIG stores that have multiple aisles of 'doze software, and NO software whatsoever for your Mac at any other store that sells software.
It doesn't matter that much for me and other geeks who load and build from tarballs, but it does to the general public.
A number of years back I stood in line to pay at a CompUSA. A woman was trying to console her crying little boy, who was pointing at boxed game software around him in the store. His mom could only say 'no, that won't run on a Mac.' Apple- making small children cry. It isn't as big a problem now, of course, because you can boot outta the Mac system if you want. It's funny that there are people who use that as justification for saying the Mac is superior, though.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
If you are a windows user, use winamp, it allows you to transfer files to your ipod (among other MP3 players) and you don't have to deal with apple's ball and chain. I've got wikipedia on my ipod: http://encyclopodia.sourceforge.net/en/index.html It makes it worth carrying around.