Creative Zen X-Fi and Ubuntu Linux - Solution

Apr 25, 2009 · 3 minute read
Category: linux

This is post is now quite old and the the information it contains may be out of date or innacurate.

If you find any errors or have any suggestions to update the information please let us know or create a pull request on GitHub

Update
Just use Banshee, it seems to work fine and its actually pretty slick :)

BTW - to format your X-FI, just start it up whilst holding down the play/pause button to get into “recovery mode” the rest is easy

Original Blog

I have now decided to totally abandon my windows installation and use Linux for everything. I was pretty much using Linux for everything already but there were a few apps that I still used windows for or simply hadn’t got around to trying out on Linux.

I have a projector hooked up for watching movies. I used to use windows XP for this but the windows driver for my Nvidia GT 9400 started to get really picky about giving me dual view, requiring reboots to get it to work properly. With the release of Jaunty and SOAS boot times, my windows XP partition was starting to look like a really unattractive solution. Its probably infected with conficker and god knows what else anyway.

Thankfully the Nvidia driver and admin software for Linux is actually really good. It needs to be launched as Sudo to work properly - simply edit the launcher and prepend gksudo before the command to give you a GUI sudo box. That’s the projector and dual view taken care of (note you need to enable Xineview or whatever its called to get a proper desktop stretching across both monitors.)

Now the last little thing is my Creative ZEN X-Fi 16GB mp3 player. I love that little box of tricks and don’t often feel the need to update the music on there as its got such a generous storage capacity. However I came to do it, plugged it in and it wasn’t picked up as a removable drive as I thought it might be. A quick search later and I discover a programme called gnomad2.

"Gnomad 2 is a GUI built on top of GTK/GNOME 2, id3lib and libnjb that makes it possible to transfer tracks and files from/to a Creative Nomad Jukebox (all brands). It is designed much like an ordinary graphical FTP program.

You can find it in syntaptic package manager. Install this and also edit the command to gksudo and you should then be able to move your music around freely. Oh yeah it runs a damn site faster than the creative windows software - sweet :-)

Windows already feels like a distant memory…