FLOSS-/hacker-friendly music-players?

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Reviving undead threads of weeks and months past....

This is a response to a message that Jim accidentically sent privately
to me--posted with his permission:

Jim Sheldon <jim.sheldon at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On Mar 16, 2010 8:45 PM, "Joshua Judson Rosen" <rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> > Joshua Judson Rosen <rozzin at geekspace.com> writes:
> > >
> > > I'm looking for a new music-player to replace...
> > 
> > Oh--of course I forgot to include in the `candidates' list, below:
> > 
> >    * NanoNote <http://sharism.cc/products/ben-nanonote/>:
> >      Cheap, expressly hacker-friendly; microphone,
> >      but no other undesirables.
> > 
> > > The reason I bought that iPod was that, at the time, iPods were not
> > > yet particularly hostile to...
>
> Have you considered the Archos 5 series that runs android?
> 
> http://www.archos.com/products/imt/archos_5it

I think I actually saw one of those at Radio Shack but dismissed it--
perhaps prematurely. I had assumed that it was as locked-up as the
other Android devices that I'd seen so far (so, it's been looking
`open-source, just not for the consumer'). However...:

> Archos also provides a developer image based on OpenEmbedded/angstrom
> to play around with.

*That* makes me perk up about it. Presumably there's a way to actually
boot a third-party image on it, then.

Do you know what the situation is with regard to, e.g.: drivers?
I've just seen way too many `open', `Linux' devices that lock-up
all sorts of functionality in obfuscated/binary-only kernel-modules,
userspace apps, and/or interfaces..., so I'm wary.

I see their page about it:

    http://www.archos.com/products/imt/archos_5it/dualoslinux.html


Oh, here we go:

     http://www.openaos.org/
     http://www.openaos.org/~kevin/archos_angstrom_docs/


It looks like they've at least got the wifi working. I wonder about the
GPS and power-management, which have been a couple of the numerous
sore points in Nokia's N-series devices.

I also came across this promising-looking post on the openembedded-devel
list, in my searches:

    http://www.mail-archive.com/openembedded-devel@lists.openembedded.org/msg03498.html

Highlights:

    This is one of the few examples where a company is a better opensource
    citizen than the "open source" commuity around their devices.

    If only those openoas dudes weren't so hellbent on keeping their
    fixes to themselves and pushed them back to angstrom and OE :(


Interesting.


I also wonder what the deal is with the `watermarking' that's supposed
to happen when the dev-image is loaded--is that something that precludes
replacing the hard disk with another one, or with a solid-state drive?

Thanks for letting me know about this--I'll have to look into it further.

I don't suppose anyone here already *has* one of these things and could
talk about their experiences with it...? :)

Like, how does its GPS compare to the N810's? ;)

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."