iRiver H10 and Linux

iRiver H10 & Ubuntu Breezy Linux HOWTO
by Charles McColm, charm@porchlight.ca
Thursday, September 22, 2005



A copy of this HOWTO is available in a number of formats:

• Open Office 2.0 .odt [18k]
  
• Microsoft Word .doc [23k]
  
• Palm Document .pdb [3k]
  
• Adobe Acrobat .pdf [296k]
  
• Text .txt [3.3k]
  

Table of Contents
* iRiver H10 & Ubuntu Breezy Linux HOWTO
* The good, the bad, the plain ugly
* Know thy iRiver H10
* My iRiver H10
* Getting the H10 to connect (overview)
* What's the problem?
* Model File
* Copy files to your H10
* Running easyh10

The good, the bad, the plain ugly
If you google for iRiver and Linux chances are you'll find positive reviews of most iRiver devices. Unfortunately the iRiver H10 is a NIGHTMARE when it comes to Linux. I don't recommend buying an iRiver H10 since it is really designed for Windows.

What follows is a hack I used to get my H10 working with Ubuntu Breezy. I cannot guarantee that it will work on your system or that it won't destroy everything. If you follow the advice here there are no guarantees.

Furthermore, I assume you know how to compile and install software. If you don't know gcc then you really should try returning your H10 for something else.

Know thy iRiver H10
It's important you know what version of the H10 you have, North American or International. This information is important.

My iRiver H10

• iRiver H10 North American edition
  
• updated to latest 2.10 firmware (I used a Windows box to update the firmware)
  

Getting the H10 to connect (overview)

1. With player off remove the battery for 30 seconds.
   
2. Put battery back on.
   
3. Connect USB cable to your computer.
   
4. Hold the 'O' key while turning the player on
   
   
   
   • you should see an “Emergency...” white text at the top
     
   
   
5. Now copy what you need to the /media/usbdisk that appears (Breezy) – see below for copying easyh10.model, an important step.
   
6. Run the appropriate easyh10 command.
   

What's the problem?
The non-geek response to this is that the H10 uses geek formatting which Linux usb doesn't understand. You'll need to copy a special “model” file to the root directory of your player in order to run some Linux indexing software. If you try to just copy files to the music directory on your H10 they won't show up in your player, they need to be indexed. You'll need to download and compile the easyh10 indexing software for the H10 from:


http://easyh10.sourceforge.net/


Model File
Once you've untarred and installed the easyh10 software, you need to copy one of the “model” files from the untarred easyh10 directory to the root directory of your H10. Note that you need to rename it easyh10.model. My 'model' file is the NA, North American file. Yours may be the North American or International. In the current version of easyH10 I found the appropriate model file under the ~/easyh10-1.0b7/model directory. You'll need to copy the appropriate file, don't just randomly choose one:


cp H10NA_5GB_FW2.03-2.10.model /media/usbdisk/easyh10.model


Copy files to your H10
I only tried copying mp3 files to /media/usbdisk (using cp and drag and drop). After I copied the files I reindexed it using the easyh10 command below.

Running easyh10
I found that running easyh10 -U /media/usbdisk gave me database errors. After copying the appropriate model to /media/usbdisk as easyh10.model the following command reindexed the new mp3 files:


easyh10 -Un -on /media/usbdisk


Unmount the player
Don't forget to umount /media/usbdisk so all media is written. If you don't unmount the player you could frag the hard drive.