chuma.org

Unfortunately, right off the get-go I was having problems getting my music and video onto the pad (which is still without a name, and no, I’m not calling it Sgt. Pepper). I had initially planned on using my USB->CF card reader to put files onto it. Unfortunately, the Linux 2.4 kernel doesn’t get along with my card reader. Not Linux or Pepper’s fault – apparently my card reader just happens to be “quirky”. Considering it cost me net $0 I’m not too pissed.

There’s also of course the Pepper Desktop software, which is supposed to let you sync the Pad’s contents with your desktop. But still no joy – I added files into the Music Library on the Desktop and followed all the instructions to start a sync, but it died at Step 4. Looking into the log files, there’s something rotten going on on the Desktop’s side I think. I sure as hell hope it isn’t Norton AntiVirus doing something bad, but I suspect something’s just broken. No joy!

Next, I thought “I know! I have this external USB hard drive with backups of all my music and video on it – I’ll just plug it into the USB port and awaaay we go!” Which should have worked. But didn’t, even after I converted the drive to FAT32. The reason? Pepper assumes that any USB device will have only one partition, sda1. Well… in order to have a 186GB FAT32 partition, it has to be within an extended partition – meaning it showed up on sda5. But even trying to mount it manually failed, which was strange to me – something just doesn’t want to read an extended partition table or something?

Finally I hacked me a solution. Samba (the Windows File Sharing client for UNIXes) is installed and works just fine on the Pepper. I suspect it will be integrated into the software soon, but all I needed to do was mount my SMB share into /media/usbhd (where Pepper expects a USB disk to be mounted) and Eureka! It worked.

I’m really hoping to solve this sync problem soon, because it’s by far the most elegant way to be doing things.