From: Christi Alice Scarborough <christi_at_chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 07:18:13 +0000

I've been beavering away for the past few weeks, and I'm happy to say
that I'm finally in a state where I'm ready to show the fruits of my
efforts to others.

The Rockbox Utility is a new installer for Rockbox. Don't we already
have one of those, I hear you cry? Yes, but Rockbox Utility is much
better. Here's why:

- Only download the installer once. It then grabs Rockbox from the website.
- No need to download lots of files you don't need for other platforms
- Support for installing daily builds and bleeding edge builds in
addition to released versions of Rockbox.
- Uninstall info is stored on your audio device. You can uninstall from
a completely different computer to the one you installed on.
- A full uninstall for when you're sending your device back under warranty.
- Since it works from the zip files made by the build system, changes to
Rockbox are much less likely to break it.
- Support for Rockbox platforms like iRiver, for which no release
version of Rockbox is available.

Also, it lays the groundwork for many cool things in the future:

- Rockbox Utility is written in wxWidgets, a portable GUI library. This
means that a Linux version and hopefully also a Mac version will be on
the way soon.
- The installer will be able to support multiple languages.
- Other functions like patching and downloading firmware, downloading
voice files and database generation can be incorporated into the featureset.
- Automatic update features. Rockbox Utility will eventually be able to
support new platforms as and when they become available by downloading
an updated configuration file.

Naturally you are all dying to give it a try, but a few words of warning
first.

This is ALPHA software. This means I've tried it, and I'm happy it
works, but do expect a few rough edges, and the possibility of data loss.

Please give me feedback on any problems you experience - this will help
to make the program more reliable.


You can download Rockbox Utility for Windows from
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~christi/misc/rbutil-0.1a-setup.exe

Hope you like it,

Christi
Received on 2005-12-19