Rockbox != Linux [LWN.net]

Rockbox != Linux

Posted Sep 22, 2005 2:33 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
Parent article: Two approaches to Open gadgets

While there are ports of Linux that run on certian Archos devices (the AV series in particular), Rockbox itself is *not* Linux. It's fully GPL'ed though.

Rockbox is its own operating system, very lean and on its original target, a 16-bit microcontroller in the Archos Jukebox series. has to fit within 2 megs of RAM, including song buffers.

While it is being ported to much more capable platforms now, that does not make it Linux.

- Solomon [using rockbox for a couple of years now]

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Rockbox != Linux

Posted Sep 22, 2005 3:15 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

Oops. Don't know how I could spend that much time digging through their stuff and still get that wrong. Article has been fixed, sorry for the confusion.

Rockbox != Linux

Posted Sep 22, 2005 9:21 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Not only is Rockbox not Linux (although the developers use Linux, and the code is generated via a GCC cross-compiler), there's no way you could get Linux to run on some of the machines this targets. Without physical modification the Archos targets have 2Mb of RAM, most of which should be devoted to MP3 buffering, and Rockbox eats into that (except if it runs out of RAM). I don't think that's exactly a Linux dream machine.

But Rockbox does what it does excellently --- and compared, in particular, to the appallling pre-installed software on Archoses, it's excellent.

One definite problem is that by the time any device is supported, it's probably no longer on sale. The only device that's even partially supported *and* on sale now is the iRiver 3xx, and that's apparently being obsoleted in favour of iRiver models that contain chips with no specs (read `no chance of running anything free on them').

What's really needed is for the manufacturers of these things to use chips with public specs, and preferably to provide specs for the devices themselves, so the devs don't need to burn time tracing the PCBs by hand.)

Rockbox 2.5

Posted Sep 22, 2005 12:53 UTC (Thu) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

Rockbox 2.5 was just released today, BTW.