So, I bought a new media player. Its this beauty, a Creative Zen 8 GB model. Its very feature packed, with everything from an FM Tuner, to contact management.

First, I’m going to detail a few problems I ran into, and how to fix them.

First issue: Linux support for the Creative Zen.

Here are the steps to solve this for most distributions:

First, download Gnomad2. In Ubuntu, that is as simple as:

sudo apt-get install gnomad2

This will make sure you get all the necessary files. However, to get gnomad2 to work with the newest Zen players, you need to follow the steps on this site:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=643512

That allowed me to interface with my Creative Zen. One caveat: some distributions will reverse the file changes you made, even with sudo access, on reboot. So, you will need to redo the last four commands in there every time you restart. Thankfully you don’t have to restart often in Linux!

The next issue I had was converting movies for the Creative Zen 8Gb model. Since I was using linux, obviously the included media software would not work.

My solution: iriverter. This program converted my movie files into a format suitable for the Creative Zen 8Gb, and the movies worked. Just worked. Granted it technically converts for the Creative Zen Vision:M, but it works!! Thanks guys for the hard work!

Now, I can watch my favourite animes, on a crystal clear screen, with crystal clear sound, while I’m on the bus, in class, anytime I’m supposed to be paying attention…