Dell crap-j
I’ve always been a fan of Linux. Ever since I was barely 13ish years old I remember splurging up $1.50 to order a Red Hat Linux cd from linuxmall.com. With all that said, I still never thought I’d see this day: the day my recently purchased mp3 player, a Dell DJ 20gb, would not work on Windows but worked perfectly fine on Linux. Here’s the story.
I recently came across a great deal on a Dell DJ. Sure, I already own a few mp3 players, but a 20gb usb powered external hard drive which also happens to play mp3s all for 35 dollars seemed like a pretty good deal. So I bought it. When it arrived, I ripped it out of its box and hooked it up to one of my desktops, which runs Vista x64. Up popped one of those infamous “Search for drivers” dialogs. I gave it a shot. It failed, of course.
But wait! All I really wanted to do was transfer music and files to it. Maybe it was designed in such a way that I could just copy mp3s over to it like an external hard drive (after all, the Dell DJ is actually made by Creative which produces the Muvo). Well, needless to say, that didn’t pan out. I could transfer files to it, but there was no “Music” folder in sight. I saw that Dell took the same approach as Apple — Dell Dj Explorer being the equivalent to Apple Itunes. Pure crap.
Popping in the included drivers disc didn’t prove to be any help either. The drivers would not install. I turned to the internet for help, but was immediately discouraged after finding that the last time Dell updated the drivers for this device was in 2005. Wow.
Then the unthinkable happened. The Dell DJ entry on Wikipedia noted that there were a couple Linux programs that could do the job: gnomad2 and neutrino. Sure enough, I pulled out my laptop, which runs Ubuntu: Hardy Heron, and plugged in the Dell crap-jay. After a quick “sudo apt-get install gnomad2″, I was happily transferring my small music collection over to the device. Awesome.
I’m not sure if my situation was a special case or not. A popular device (as popular as can be in the IPod saturated mp3 player market) compatible with Linux and not Windows? Who woulda thunk it? Not me.