Brian Gallimore's Blog

Back in the days before the mighty iPod, lots of exciting MP3 players were available. I researched and compared and bought a Sonic Blue (used to be called Diamond) Rio S50. It was pretty small, used standard SD card memory, inexpensive, used a single AA battery that would last 10 hours, and included a FM tuner. I used it a lot, until I bought a smartphone which made it pretty much obsolete. I recently dug the device out of a drawer and wanted to see if I could make it work with Linux, which is was never really designed to do. There is an open source package that some awesome person developed. Unfortunately, it is not in the Ubuntu package manager, so I decided to try to install it myself. After lots of heartache (think resolving dependencies manually, compile errors, etc) I emerged victorious. I also found a graphical Java interface that worked with it. Sweet. One remaining problem is that I have some sort of permissions issue, I have to run the program as root to make it work. (fix later). So, from a gEEky point a view, I am pretty studly tonight.


brian@BG-ubuntuDesktop:~$ rioutil -i
Attempting to open Rio and retrieve song list.... failed!
Reason: Operation not permitted.
librioutil tried to use method: libusb
brian@BG-ubuntuDesktop:~$ sudo !!
sudo rioutil -i
[sudo] password for brian:
Attempting to open Rio and retrieve song list.... complete
Name:
Serial Number: 104a18e30291000000467e0ab5368356

Player Space Used: 970.7 MiB in 74 files
Total Player Time: 35:16:52
brian@BG-ubuntuDesktop:~$