Damned's Journal: Creative Zen Vision: M and SuSE 9.3

I might have something inherently weird about the setup on my machine, but on the assumption that others may have the same problems, I'm putting this here. Maybe it will get listed by Google. At the very least it will be good for remembering what all went wrong.

I updated my system from SuSE 9.0 to 9.3 with downloaded CDs. Not everything went all that well (mostly because I didn't listen to myself, but..), but everything was working alright eventually.

I didn't think anything was terribly wrong when lsusb gave no output and df didn't show my usb drive. I figured it was a config file somewhere that needed a slight tweak, but I was very busy and so long as everything still worked pretty well (i.e. I could read and write to the devices on USB), I was happy to let things go.

Time goes by, and I decide it's finally time to get a portable mp3 player. I look around and decide that the Creative Zen Vision: M (zv:m or zvm hereafter) looks best. Who could argue with the number of supported codecs except to hope future firmware updates will allow it to play Ogg* and H.264?

I sought out all of the information I could find about getting a zv:m playing well with Linux, considering it uses Microsoft's MTP rather than UMS. I get, compile, and install the latest versions of libusb, libnjb, libmtp, etc. Udev rules are copied, gnomad2 and amaroK are ready to do their thing, so I purchase the zv:m.

But when I get it all plugged in, tragedy. It's nowhere to be seen. What's wrong? I try lsusb, forgetting that it hasn't been showing me the things connected through USB for some time. I assume that this lack of output from lsusb is peculiar to SuSE 9.3 itself rather than my particular system. I write to the mailing lists, and, many hours later and with a lot of help from some very nice and helpful people, I find that it was a configuration issue after all.

How it all was fixed: Two relatively minor changes to configuration files. Because I had updated an old system, my /etc/fstab had a deprecated entry for the USB filesystem

usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0

A simple :%s/usbdevfs/usbfs/g fixed that problem, and lsusb was working again.

Then, the libmtp.rules file that comes with libmtp did not play well with SuSE 9.3's udev implementation; every line that wasn't commented out gave an error saying that the parameters weren't quite right and were skipped. It took a little looking at the other .rules files in /etc/udev/rules.d and the documentation available online to find out that this:

# Creative Zen Vision:M
SYSFS{idVendor}=="041e", SYSFS{idProduct}=="413e", SYMLINK+="libmtp-%k", MODE="0666"

should be this:

# Creative Zen Vision:M
BUS="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="041e", SYSFS{idProduct}=="413e", SYMLINK+="libmtp-%k", MODE="0666"

And that's it, everything's up and running decently smoothly now. It would be nice to be able to see where files are located in the zvm's filesystem (there must be a way. Creative's software must do this, right? I no longer have a Windows partition to check, so it's just guessing.). It would also be nice to see all of the directories rather than a mass of all media files (gnomad2) or a listing of the directory structure of only the audio files (amaroK). If I had the time and knowhow, I'd also make something for moving files from one place to another if we already know their location within the filesystem (like with amaroK and audio files since I told it to put files on the zv:m under <music directory>/<artist>/<album>) even if it was something as kludgy as pulling the file onto disk, erasing it from the zv:m, pushing it back to the zv:m in the new location.

Oh well, it's working now, and I'm rather happy about that.