iPods, iPods, iPods - lets all be slaves to apple

[rjs]

iPods. They suck and dont play oggs, but i shelled out my money for a shuffle anyway, and gtkpod doesnt fully support shuffles yet. However i heard that konqueror can be used to update iPods. but this relies on something called ipodslave (part of the kpod project - sourceforge.net/projects/kpod ). This comes standard with Suse, but not it would seem ubuntu. Is there some ubuntu repository that i dont know about that it is in? and if not, how do i go about installing it?

Has anybody else tried using it on ubuntu? how does it go? anyone know if it works with suffles?

paz y amor,
-rjs

p.s iPods are evil. Why dont they support oggs?

[jkndrkn]

Corporations don't like supporting non-proprietary file formats. It undermines their efforts. Also, there is a very popular plugin for winamp that lets you sync to an ipod and also transfer music from it to your computer. It even works in win98. If you still have an install of windows around, you can give that a try until you get things sorted out in linux.

[bored2k]

iPods. They suck and dont play oggs, but i shelled out my money for a shuffle anyway, and gtkpod doesnt fully support shuffles yet. However i heard that konqueror can be used to update iPods. but this relies on something called ipodslave (part of the kpod project - sourceforge.net/projects/kpod ). This comes standard with Suse, but not it would seem ubuntu. Is there some ubuntu repository that i dont know about that it is in? and if not, how do i go about installing it?

Has anybody else tried using it on ubuntu? how does it go? anyone know if it works with suffles?

paz y amor,
-rjs

p.s iPods are evil. Why dont they support oggs?
You should try gtkpod. http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=36632&highlight=gtkpod

[jdonnell]

Corporations don't like supporting non-proprietary file formats. It undermines their efforts.

This is one of the most overly simplistic statements I have ever heard. There are many instances where the opposite is true.

[nobodysbusiness]

I've been working on getting my iPod shuffle up and running for some time now. GTKPod never worked for me, it would always give me errors when trying to sync to the iPod. GNUPod works perfectly, but on the other hand, it's command line only which is a hassle for me. Also, GNUPod doesn't support copy protected tunes that I download through iTunes (in CrossOver office) or Audible.com audiobooks. For the iTunes music, I can probably use the Hymn project to un-copyprotect them, but for the audiobooks, I'm humped. My present favorite plan is to use my Fiancee's Powerbook for updating my iPod with new audiobooks and music, which should work fine since Mac is a supported platform. If anyone else knows a better way of using a Shuffle on Linux, be sure to let me know.

[jdodson]

i have a zen player. its lame that it wont play oggs, but then again i didnt by a player that supported ogg, i bought one that supported, mp3, wav and wma. next time, buy one that supports ogg, your money will reinforce the ogg playback industry.

however, in both our cases, we did not support the ogg playback industry. same on us both.

[rjs]

I've been working on getting my iPod shuffle up and running for some time now. GTKPod never worked for me, it would always give me errors when trying to sync to the iPod. GNUPod works perfectly, but on the other hand, it's command line only which is a hassle for me. Also, GNUPod doesn't support copy protected tunes that I download through iTunes (in CrossOver office) or Audible.com audiobooks. For the iTunes music, I can probably use the Hymn project to un-copyprotect them, but for the audiobooks, I'm humped. My present favorite plan is to use my Fiancee's Powerbook for updating my iPod with new audiobooks and music, which should work fine since Mac is a supported platform. If anyone else knows a better way of using a Shuffle on Linux, be sure to let me know.

hey, all i can find with aptitude is gnupod-tools. I dont understand why gnupod-tools would be in the repository without gnupod. ...or am i completely missing something here?

paz y amor,
-rjs

[rjs]

yikes.

i just realised that this is in community chat. Sorry to everyone for posting this in the wrong part of the forum. I could have sworn i put it in the "other application support" section.

I must have had many many tabs open all at once (as usual) and typed in the wrong one. Anyway, once again sorry.

paz y amor,
-rjs

[costoa]

Why dont they support oggs?

It takes more CPU power than the iPod has to play oggs. Oh, and oggs would cut into the iTunes Music Store business.

As for your general complaints about Apple your right. Consider this:

- Jobs killed off the Newton (a great piece of technology) solely because it was John Scully's (previous Apple CEO) pet project.
- iTunes once allowed an user to stream their purchased music to three other machines across the Internet. Then they quietly neutered it so only machines on the same subnet could access said music. Even though you paid for it, they said where you could listen to it. At least you can burn tunes to an audio cd (for now).
- Hypercard was a sweet, simple and fun programming environment. Apple gave away and it had a very large following. Then they only gave away the "player" or non-development version. After years of no updates they stopped distributing it. No reason given. Rumor had it Job's didn't like it. A similar fate befell the lesser known OpenDoc. Calls to release HyperCard into the wild have fallen on deaf ears.
- Apple use to freely release the hardware internal information. After they ended "mklinux", their distro, so did the free exchange of hardware information. Some is still out there but people are also stuck reverse engineer other parts.

My first Mac was a Mac Plus and many Macs later an eMac sits on the same desk as my Ubuntu box. It only gets used for video work. They're wonderful machines but in many ways too restrictive. Using a Mac is like living in a nice company town. Yes, it's nice, but the company still controls everything. In this case Steve Jobs is like Nero, all it takes is a thumb's up or down and the Mac user has to live by his whim.

GNU/Linux does not suffer from this baggage. As for a music player, iriver makes some nice oggs players. I use my Palm Tungsten E and some 512M SD cards (hardly perfect but works ok). I'll move over to the Nokia 770 tablet (runs GNU/Linux, GNOME, rumored python and the street price will be about $350USD) when it comes out this year.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
http://www.nokia.com/770

[rjs]

Why dont they support oggs?

It takes more CPU power than the iPod has to play oggs. Oh, and oggs would cut into the iTunes Music Store business.


nope, this was an idea floated on a blog by someone, which spread like wildfire over the blogosphere, but it's not true. Do a google search on "ogg iPod" if you want to learn the ins and outs of the case.

anyway, my original question asking why oggs arent on iPods was... um retorical.

paz y amor,
-rjs

[rjs]

GNU/Linux does not suffer from this baggage. As for a music player, iriver makes some nice oggs players. I use my Palm Tungsten E and some 512M SD cards (hardly perfect but works ok). I'll move over to the Nokia 770 tablet (runs GNU/Linux, GNOME, rumored python and the street price will be about $350USD) when it comes out this year.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
http://www.nokia.com/770

Damn that looks awesome. So that's about $AU450, excellent.

...except of cause it doesnt... um... support oggs either.

oh well, if its based on linux im sure there will be some way of getting around that,

paz y amor,
-rjs

[ssam]

dont most of these players have hardware decoders?

its not a case whether the cpu is powerful enough to play a format, its whether it has a mpeg/ogg/wma decoder chip in there.

sam

[flyride13]

can anyone give me advice to get my ipod working, when i turn it on or restart it the apple comes up and then it goes to the folder with the triangle in front of it, how do i get it to go back to normal?

[flyride13]

can anyone give me advice to get my ipod working, when i turn it on or restart it the apple comes up and then it goes to the folder with the triangle in front of it, how do i get it to go back to normal?

[Stormy Eyes]

p.s iPods are evil. Why dont they support oggs?

Because they suck like Britney Spears getting a record contract? I prefer the iRiver H series.

[super]

yeah ipod shuffles suck. i got mine free from a promotion and i was definitely underwhelmed.

[kvidell]

Do you know what a floating point processor is and that it's required for OggVorbis playback?

_you_ try putting one in a portable media player like the iPod, have it work right and play back the audio correctly without dipping the speed and retain any features and abilities the player already has without hindering it's battery life.
- Kev

[DJ_Max]

p.s iPods are evil. Why dont they support oggs?
How many people know what Ogg Vorbis is, or even care to have an ogg file on their PC when mp3 has become the norm....

[NateC]

actually you can play OGG on an ipod.

http://www.ipodlinux.org/Main_Page

[TravisNewman]

that's still a bit buggy

[kvidell]

actually you can play OGG on an ipod.

http://www.ipodlinux.org/Main_Page
But that's cheating(IE: Not a stock iPod) and only a replicated FPP. A real one is much harder to achieve :-P

[ubuntp]

Do you know what a floating point processor is and that it's required for OggVorbis playback?
My iRiver has no floating point proc and plays ogg.

[Stormy Eyes]

Do you know what a floating point processor is and that it's required for OggVorbis playback?

I was doing Vorbis playback on a Sharp Zaurus a couple of years ago, and its ARM processor didn't have floating-point capability. There are codecs for architectures that only do integer math. Given that anybody can use Vorbis without fear of legal reprisals, Apple really has no excuse to omit Vorbis support from their iPod.

[kvidell]

I was doing Vorbis playback on a Sharp Zaurus a couple of years ago, and its ARM processor didn't have floating-point capability. There are codecs for architectures that only do integer math. Given that anybody can use Vorbis without fear of legal reprisals, Apple really has no excuse to omit Vorbis support from their iPod.
Oh! Well that's cool...

Is it in any way slower, buggier.. etc?

[YourSurrogateGod]

Imo, Apple is a bigger piece of crap that Windows. From my experience, their OS was the most annoying one that I've ever used. Jobs is a thief in that he took so much from the open source community (Mac OS is based on OpenBSD or something) and gave nothing back (where is iTunes for Linux Jobs?)

[kvidell]

Imo, Apple is a bigger piece of crap that Windows. From my experience, their OS was the most annoying one that I've ever used. Jobs is a thief in that he took so much from the open source community (Mac OS is based on OpenBSD or something) and gave nothing back (where is iTunes for Linux Jobs?)
...
He/They stole nothing. They've been playing nice with the open source community the whole way through.
If you go to their developer section, you can download their flavour of BSD (http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4.2/) and run it on your PPC or x86 machine _right now_. These have been available since OSX premiered (source and binaries).

iTunes isn't on Linux because gasp.. it's an OSX app. It's only on Windows because Apple and MS have been scratching eachother's backs for years. I'm surprised you weren't upset that they have Sims 2 and MSOffice and Linux doesn't :-P

At least Apple doesn't have screwy Software Licensing like Windows does... and is intuitive to some extent.

My only gripe is that the interface isn't _as_ customisable out of the box as I'd like, and that you can't completely get rid of Aqua and just have a nice basic look.
But I don't mind Aqua so it doesn't really bother me generally.
- Kev

PS: BSD is free. It's hard to steal something that's free. There's a good reason it's free, too btw. Know what it is?
BSD was Developed by UCBerkeley through a DARPA grant... DARPA being funded through the taxpayer's money, you've "already paid for it" :-P

[TravisNewman]

Apple is doing nothing illegal, but is an example of why I don't like the BSD license. GPL wouldn't have permitted what apple has done with their bsd base. They let you download Darwin, their BSD flavor, but they could have given much more. If I recall correctly, Darwin is a different license from BSD and is kinda screwy

[kvidell]

Apple is doing nothing illegal, but is an example of why I don't like the BSD license. GPL wouldn't have permitted what apple has done with their bsd base. They let you download Darwin, their BSD flavor, but they could have given much more. If I recall correctly, Darwin is a different license from BSD and is kinda screwy
True but in some instances the GPL license isn't exactly a good thing as it's "Viral".
Essentially, GPL says "you can take this open source item and add to it or make changes but any additions and changes you make are GPL open source also"

BSD's license says "you can take this open source item and add to it or make changes but you have the right to decide any licensing provisions regarding your own changes/additions and they can be as closed or open as you wish"

For people like Apple who have things they need to protect since their OS isn't the only thing they do, this is a good thing.

Random fun fact: The TCP/IP stack from NT is BSD's ;P
Also, in the back of the Sony PSP manual is a blurb "This device contains BSD licensed code sourced from the NetBSD project (URL)"

I like that the BSD license is "noninfectious"; Gives people a chance to use something not proprietary without having to "worry" about their intelectual property going Open Source before they're ready.
Nice way to spread the love around, I think :)

- Kev
PS: Credit goes to a friend of mine, Clint, for teaching me the ways of the BSD/Darwin licensing and the blurb from his PSP's manual. :smile:

[TravisNewman]

I disagree some ;) BSD license is more free for developers, but less free for potential users, depending on the situation.

Granted, it's a good thing for proprietary software vendors, but they essentially took a buttload of work that wasn't theirs, messed with it, added a pretty face, and sold it. It's a better OS than 9, by far, but it does feel like they're ripping off the BSD people.

[kvidell]

I disagree some ;) BSD license is more free for developers, but less free for potential users, depending on the situation.

Granted, it's a good thing for proprietary software vendors, but they essentially took a buttload of work that wasn't theirs, messed with it, added a pretty face, and sold it. It's a better OS than 9, by far, but it does feel like they're ripping off the BSD people.
I gotcha... They are trying though, I think...

From: http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/darwin/
The Darwin kernel is based on FreeBSD and Mach 3.0 technologiesWith links, even.
There's also the list (http://www.apple.com/opensource/) of open source items used in OSX, with links.

From the way it sounds on the BSD side, they're happy people are using their code in new and "adventurous" ways.

It would be much worse if the Apple folk were taking no part in crediting those due.

I do want to know more about what you think, though.
What all do you mean by "ripping them off" ? Just that they're re-selling it or something more?
- Kev

[flyride13]

when i turn my ipod on or restart it, it shows the apple and then it goes to some folder with a triangle and then it'll turn off. n e one know how to get it back to normal

[ubuntu_demon]

I disagree some ;) BSD license is more free for developers, but less free for potential users, depending on the situation.

Granted, it's a good thing for proprietary software vendors, but they essentially took a buttload of work that wasn't theirs, messed with it, added a pretty face, and sold it. It's a better OS than 9, by far, but it does feel like they're ripping off the BSD people.
I havent deeply investigated this ... but don't they give back to bsd ?

It would be nice if Apple changed to total open source. I don't see any reason for them not to do it.

[miscz]

It would be nice if Apple changed to total open source. I don't see any reason for them not to do it.
With Apple switching to x86 they risk OS X being hacked to run on generic x86 computers. If they made it open-source it will be even easier (it will be hacked anyway). Apple is a hardware company and OS X is a nice addition to their computers but it's also the thing that appeals to most of customers and makes them switch imho. What would be the point of switching to overpriced hardware when you can run OS X on generic x86?

[ubuntu_demon]

With Apple switching to x86 they risk OS X being hacked to run on generic x86 computers. If they made it open-source it will be even easier (it will be hacked anyway). Apple is a hardware company and OS X is a nice addition to their computers but it's also the thing that appeals to most of customers and makes them switch imho. What would be the point of switching to overpriced hardware when you can run OS X on generic x86?
because apple makes sure their hardware runs stable,quiet and looks pretty
Also they could choose to make everything open source except their applications.

[Brunellus]

because apple makes sure their hardware runs stable,quiet and looks pretty
Also they could choose to make everything open source except their applications.
I'm not willing to pay for pretty on a machine that nobody sees but me.

Hey, come to think of it, why not just run a phat stack of servers in the basement, and use a thin client in rooms where people see? It'd be like having central a/c, but for heavy computing. h'mmmm.

[ubuntu_demon]

I'm not willing to pay for pretty on a machine that nobody sees but me.

Hey, come to think of it, why not just run a phat stack of servers in the basement, and use a thin client in rooms where people see? It'd be like having central a/c, but for heavy computing. h'mmmm.
I prefer my current setup of a p3 gateway stacked with 3 harddrives and my powerful p4 desktop with only 1 harddrive. My mum doesn't let me put the gateway in the room next to the cable modem so I'll put it in an open closet next to the boiler(cv-ketel in dutch) in my room (in the top of our house)

[miscz]

because apple makes sure their hardware runs stable,quiet and looks pretty
My hardware is stable and quiet. I've built it myself from parts that many would consider crap (ever heard of Zeus GeForce cards? or Asrock motherboards? :P). They required some tuning - motherboard didn't play well with Seagate hard drive, I had to flash bios, video card was in need of real fan but they are pretty cheap. I've got everything running smoothly now and I saved a lot of money. I would have to pay twice as much for this kind of Apple computer. If I ever cared if my computer looked pretty I'd mod it myself. Lots of people have to look for such solutions because they don't have money. The real advantage of Mac is the OS, without it it's just not worth it.

[ubuntu_demon]

My hardware is stable and quiet. I've built it myself from parts that many would consider crap (ever heard of Zeus GeForce cards? or Asrock motherboards? :P). They required some tuning - motherboard didn't play well with Seagate hard drive, I had to flash bios, video card was in need of real fan but they are pretty cheap. I've got everything running smoothly now and I saved a lot of money. I would have to pay twice as much for this kind of Apple computer. If I ever cared if my computer looked pretty I'd mod it myself. Lots of people have to look for such solutions because they don't have money. The real advantage of Mac is the OS, without it it's just not worth it.
I know their OS is a big advantage. But if they guarantee it works perfectly on each mac and they make their OS open source but don't guarantee that it works on a pc then people still have a reason to go buy a mac. Also average users don't want to build their own machines but they want one that's quiet and pretty

also like I said .. they can choose not to make their applications open source

[geokker]

I'd have bought an iPod if they had a radio. I'm amazed they don't - the touch wheel would be great for tuning.

[Brunellus]

I'd have bought an iPod if they had a radio. I'm amazed they don't - the touch wheel would be great for tuning.
probably would have increased the size of the unit unacceptably. iPods have a very good form-factor, I'll grant them that.

[drizek]

probably would have increased the size of the unit unacceptably. iPods have a very good form-factor, I'll grant them that.
OR, you can buy an iriver with ogg support, line-in mp3 recording AND a radio without having to sacrifice comfort/style.

[Brunellus]

OR, you can buy an iriver with ogg support, line-in mp3 recording AND a radio without having to sacrifice comfort/style.
I have an H340.

It is *not* the same size as the iPod--it is twice as thick, and somewhat heavier. The difference is noticeable: the iPod has a "pack of cigarettes" profile, while the iRiver has a "very small WalkMan" profile. The former is remarkable; the latter is acceptable.

I am very happy with my H340. I am also ready to acknowledge the obvious when it comes to the physical dimensions of the unit