iRony RockBox Installer

In my blog post yesterday I described iRony, an install party I helped organize for iPods. In the post, I pointed folks to some resources for holding similar parties.

To help with mass installs at our party, I wrote a simple installer for RockBox in Python that would run on GNU/Linux. With a few modifications, the script could be relatively easily converted to also run on Mac OS X.

While an unofficial installer exists for Windows, my installer, simply called the iRony RockBox Installer, seems to be the first installer for GNU/Linux.

Of course, the installer is still largely rough and untested and is definitely unsupported by the RockBox team. If you get around to trying it, please send me feedback, advice, or and patches. You can grab it (and future version) here: http://mako.cc/projects/irony/

3 Replies to “iRony RockBox Installer”

  1. A number of the formats RockBox plays are non-free in countries that have software patents (such as the US).

    Is there a version of RockBox that is free for all users around the world–a version that only plays free formats, unencumbered by known patents?

    I figure this would mean leaving out MPEG-related codecs (such as MP3), AAC, and possibly others.  I also figure that this would mean that the Xiph stuff would be left enabled by default (Ogg wrapper, Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex codecs) as I know of no patent encumberances for them.

    Liberating your iPod sounds like a great idea, but I would like to see a situation where people could take on the patent-encumbered formats only if they want to.  I don’t have a problem with people choosing to do so (even if it means violating patent law) but I don’t think it should be done by default.

  2. I haven’t looked into doing this but I suspect it will be pretty easy to remove support for any subset of the supported audio formats.

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