I’ve started playing around with Rockbox for my Sansa Cip+, about which I’ll post separately. However, I wanted to point out something I found interesting, funny and kind of pathetic. I downloaded the source and could build the firmware itself but the testable UI Simulator does not build on the Snow Leopard version of OS X. You’d think that the software failing to build on the most widely distributed Unix variant on a newest version that has been out for a year would be of interest to them, but you’d be wrong. Instead the advice was to set up a VM instance, install Linux on it and build from there. Oh boy. That’s a fun way to encourage participation – add yet another yak to shave. Pass.
As it happens, my day job workstation is Ubuntu and I spent today doing work with some slow compiles so I was able to build and test from there in the dead time waiting for builds. However, there was no chance of me going out of my way to set up a Linux VM on my Macbook in order to work with Rockbox software. At that point, you might as well tell me to “write a distributed map reduce function in Erlang”, ala this webcomic.
