The new iPod (3rd generation) and Suse Linux 9

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I have bought an iPod. And it appears that the 3rd generation iPod is substantially different from the previous models. E.g. in its file system. In previous models you could convert the HFS+ file system into a FAT32 filesystem. HFS+ is the filesystem used by the new MacOS X OS. It cannot be read by Windows OS (unless you buy commerical third party software such as MacOpener or MacDrive). There are several Linux-interfaces for the iPod, but they all require that the iPod is mounted as a regular mass storage device. Suse Linux 9 luckily has support for HFS+ filesystems although it is still experimental. In order to be able to mount HFS+ formatted file systems, you have to load the hfsplus kernel module:sudo /sbin/modprobe hfsplusAfter that you can just plug in the iPod. After a while you will hear a beep meaning that it was recognized. To determine which device number it got you should check the system messages:tail -30 /var/log/messagesAs it is handles like a SCSI device it will get probably sda if it is your first usb/firewire device. If you have already usb or firewire devices connected to your computer it will get maybe sdb or sdc (and so on). Create a mount point:sudo mkdir /media/ipodThe 3rd generation iPod has apparently two partitions. The first must be for the firmware/system software (sdx1) and the second is for the data (sdx29. Funnily when I tried to mount it withsudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdc2 /media/ipodthe system complained that something is not OK with the device. However, when I tried:sudo mount -o umask=000 /dev/sdc2 /media/ipodeverything went smoothly. The umask option is necessary in order to give everybody read-write access. Otherwise only root can write. I installed gtkpod to move my mp3s to the iPod. There is even a Suse 9 rpm around.

BSPlayer and corrupted DivX files

Sun, 20 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I have a couple of scratched CDs with DivX video files. Both VLC and DivX Player were not able to play these files beyond the first corrupted frames. They tried to resume, but because the damage was too much, they did get stuck completely. But I found a player that handles most of these problems quite well: BSPlayer . It is only available for Windows though…

Multimedia on Michael’s Domain

The new iPod (3rd generation) and Suse Linux 9

BSPlayer and corrupted DivX files