Thursday October 07, 2004

Got my iPod working with my Solaris desktop. Very cool.

Sometime around the end of July, the support for 1394 mass storage devices (CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, Zipdisks, and devices like the iPod - which is just a 1394 hard drive) was integrated into Solaris 10. I run the latest S10 build on my desktop, of course, so I've got the new Solaris 1394 Mass Storage driver, but most of you will have to wait for the next Solaris Express release (any day now).

The new 'scsa1394' driver implements the Serial Bus Protocol 2 (SBP-2) specification, which allows 1394 mass storages devices, like the iPod, to look and act like any other disk that you're used to using. This driver joins the existing collection of drivers know collectively as the Solaris 1394 Software Framework. The framework provides support for FireWire on SPARC and x86 systems and supports both 1394 digital video (DV) camera devices and 1394 conferencing camera ("webcam") devices, in addition to the new 1394 mass storage devices.

So, anyway, I plug my iPod into one of the FireWire ports on my system (it's immediately recognized after the hotplug), mount the drive, 'cd' and/or 'ls' to see the music files (and all the other hidden tidbits in there) and run xmms to listen to my tunes while I'm in my office at work.

Next step, I figure, is to try to get something like gtkpod working on Solaris 10 so that I can add/remove files from the iPod's database, use my playlists, and have a nicer GUI interface. But it's actually pretty cool as it is. I'll post again, though, when I get it working.

In short though, if you use Solaris and you love your iPod, stay tuned for some really cool new stuff coming to your desktop.