Sansa, Rockbox, Free Software for antiques (was: Digital Voice Recorders and Linux)

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Seth Cohn <sethcohn at gnuhampshire.org> writes:
>
> > It's worth shopping around for these, too: NewEgg offers Sansa products,
> > refurbished, at quite a bargain. They've got a 2Gb Clip in today's
> > mailing for $24.99.
> 
> Woot! often has refurb Sansas at good prices.
> 
> Also, consider installing Rockbox on many different models for better
> Linux compatibility.

Also, note that there are outstanding issues with Rockbox on the newer
Sansa hardware (anything manufactured in the past year or so), cf.:

        http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SansaAMS

... but, if you're buying a refurbished one, then maybe you'll be able
to get one that's sufficiently old.

I'm a longtime Rockbox user, and I'm still very enthusiastic about it,
but the whole `firmware for reverse-engineered platforms (produced by
more-or-less hostile third parties)' premise of the project has
resulted it being a sort of learning-experience that leads me to be
/more/ enthusiastic about `open hardware' projects when I see them--
things like what Neuros, Openmoko, Qi Hardware, OpenPandora, et al.
are doing.

Luckily, the Sansa devices seem to be nigh indestructible--so if you
get one onto which you can load Rockbox, you shouldn't need to worry
much about how you'll never be able to replace it when it breaks :)

If my Rockbox'd iPod breaks, on the oher hand....
I guess I should figure out how I'm going to handle that....

-- 
Don't be afraid to ask (Lf.((Lx.xx) (Lr.f(rr)))).