[ale] archos jukebox multimedia 20

[Charles Shapiro]

The Archos Multimedia Jukebox 20 ( http://www.archos.com/ ) does not
(yet) work with rockbox ( http://rockbox.haxx.se/ ), alas. 

But it does play nicely with linux. Near's I can tell it's straight usb
mass storage, and it works fine with a Debian 'Woody' and a 2.4.20
kernel compiled to include the usb mass storage drivers. To copy files
back and forth, you plug it into the usb port, turn it on, and look for
the scsi device assigned to it in the messages to the console (or in the
logs, I reckon).  Then you mount that to a mount directory: "mount -t
vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/archos". After that, you can copy files and even
edit playlists, which turn out to be simple text files full of filenames
with tolerance for unix '\n' line endings as well as the '\r\n' line
endings written by the internal software.

More better even, last night I successfully did a firmware upgrade.
After looking at the directions carefully, I concluded that they'd done
things the Right Way. It looked like I just needed to copy the upgrade
file to the archos hard drive's root, then choose 'upgrade' from the
internal menus. Sure enough, that worked like a champ, and I'm now
running v 1.2.2 of the firmware instead of the 1.1.0 on the device when
I got it.  You can download upgrades from the archos site. Version
1.2.2  is dated April 15, and the distro even comes with a changes list
that documents every fix from 1.0.0 on. New features include 'shuffle'
mode when playing music, a disk drive activity indicator, and a greatly
improved battery status display. They even have themes on the tiny 1" x
2" screen now!

Who knows, maybe someday it'll play oggs.  

Quite a change from the evil Cybiko, rife with undocumented interfaces
and windows-only closed code.

-- CHS
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