My first experience with Rockbox

[rockbox-newbie]

As you can understand from my nick, i am a Rockbox newbie. I won my 30 GB iPod video in a lottery and received it today. The first thing i did with it was, of course, to install Rockbox.
Since i never used any iPods before, i tried to mount it to my machine as /dev/sda1 and it didn't work. Then as /dev/sda and it also didn't work. I foun out that i should mount it as /dev/sda2 and it mounted perfectly.
Then i installed Rockbox as described in manual, and it worked perfectly.
Then some troubles appeared.
I changed language to Russian and saw that default font does not contain Cyrillic letters. Then i downloaded and installed the font pack and found a font that contains Cyrillic letters.
Well, Rockbox works well for me. I tried most of the plugins, tried to read text files and view photos. Sometimes Rockbox hangs the player, but it is easily restarted by pressing Select plus Menu and the settings are not lost.
Of course, as i advance in using Rockbox, some questions to the community will arise.
The first one is:
Why when i try to perform dosfsck on my iPod, dosfsck hangs and needs to be stopped manually by Ctrl+Z? All my flash drives are checked by dosfsck without trouble, but iPod does not. It then mounts and unmounts perfectly, though.
The second is:
iPod has a composite video output pin on its connector, which, by using a special cable, can be used to connect the player to a TV and display photos on a big screen. Does this output work in Rockbox?
The third is:
Where do i download ZXbox? I haven't found it on the site.
And the fourth:
Is there a way to connect a keyboard to iPod in order to compose texts on it?
Thanks in advance!

[lights0ut]

1. no clue what you're talking about, sorry

2. rockbox does not make use of the TV out capability, you'll have to use the apple OS for that.
    http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodAccessories

3.ZXbox is a plugin, it is included in Rockbox : About ZXbox

4. I know of no such accessory

Hope that you enjoy rockbox.

[rockbox-newbie]

Well, but that page only descripts what ZXbox is and does not have any download link.

[bascule]

...ZXbox is a plugin, it is included in Rockbox : About ZXbox...

[rockbox-newbie]

No, it is not included in plugin directory, maybe it is not ported to my model (iPod video)?
Also a question, does there exist any html viewer for Rockbox which can view html files with images?

[Llorean]

If you'd read the page linked, which you really must do in these forums (our guidelines require the actual reading of our documentation), you'd have seen this line "This a viewer plugin - you can't see it in 'plugins' menu." followed by information on how to use it.

And no, there's no HTML plugin.

[Febs]

Please READ the page that you've been referred to twice in this thread:

Description
ZX Spectrum 48k emulator. This a viewer plugin - you can't see it in 'plugins' menu. For using it you must get a tape (tzx,tap) or snapshot (sna,z80) file. You can get some at World of Spectrum archive: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/archive.html

[Yotto]

I'll take a stab at #1:

You're using Linux to look at a Microsoft file system on Apple hardware.  Be glad you can see the drive at all

I've had similar problems, and would suggest you use chkdsk from a windows box to do your lower level checking.

[Vortex]

Are you sure you did a dosfsck on /dev/sda2 (the mountable partition) and not /dev/sda ?

[rockbox-newbie]

Thank you all for the answers. I'll try to open a .tap file to see if plugin will run it.
I have no windows box at all.
Is there a way to request features for Rockbox? Maybe i encourage someone to write a simple pdf or html viewer, or TV-out support.
I also have a cool idea. Well, an accessory that allows connecting keyboard to iPod does not exist, but it can be designed,right? A homemade microcontroller based device which converts PS/2 keyboard protocol to iPod remote protocol, which then is recognized by a driver embedded into Rockbox and allows composing texts.
P.S. Maybe i will also contribute something into Rockbox pool - some cool themes.

[AlexP]

Is there a way to request features for Rockbox?

Click the link marked Feature Requests on the left of this and every page.

Maybe i encourage someone to write a simple pdf or html viewer, or TV-out support.

Sure anything is possible.  PDF and HTML viewers would be 'easier', as we have no knowledge of any of the chips in the iPod (including the TV out/Broadcom decoding chip) - all work has been done by reverse engineering or by using datasheets for similar but not identical chips that are available.  Either way, it is non-trivial.

I also have a cool idea. Well, an accessory that allows connecting keyboard to iPod does not exist, but it can be designed,right? A homemade microcontroller based device which converts PS/2 keyboard protocol to iPod remote protocol, which then is recognized by a driver embedded into Rockbox and allows composing texts.

You would first need to write a driver for the apple remote protocol.

[rockbox-newbie]

I tried to open .tap files. Zxbox starts loading the file, but it's very, very slow.
If someone will ever want to write iPod remote driver, the protocol description is here: http://www.maushammer.com/systems/ipod-remote/ipod-remote.html

[saratoga]

I tried to open .tap files. Zxbox starts loading the file, but it's very, very slow.
If someone will ever want to write iPod remote driver, the protocol description is here: http://www.maushammer.com/systems/ipod-remote/ipod-remote.html

Thats how you write a program to talk to the Apple OS.  Since we don't use the Apple OS, its not really useful.

[GodEater]

Sure anything is possible.  PDF and HTML viewers would be 'easier'

Easier perhaps - but neither of these are new feature requests, they come up all the time, and so far no-one's started either - because they're not easy. HTML in its many incarnations is not that easy to parse, especially because a lot of it is so badly written. Modern internet browsers (which have *enormous* code trees) have been written to try to show what the author meant, not what he actually ended up writing.

A PDF viewer is probably not that much easier, although I believe most PDF generators tend to stick to the rules a lot more than HTML authoring systems do. Acrobat, evince, xpdf and the like are all pretty large programs - and you've got to bear in mind, the formats they're designed to show are supposed to be viewed on a large computer monitor, not a tiny DAP screen.

In other words, as I've said before on the subject - don't hold your breath.

[AlexP]

Sure anything is possible.  PDF and HTML viewers would be 'easier'

Easier perhaps - but neither of these are new feature requests, they come up all the time, and so far no-one's started either - because they're not easy. HTML in its many incarnations is not that easy to parse, especially because a lot of it is so badly written. Modern internet browsers (which have *enormous* code trees) have been written to try to show what the author meant, not what he actually ended up writing.

A PDF viewer is probably not that much easier, although I believe most PDF generators tend to stick to the rules a lot more than HTML authoring systems do. Acrobat, evince, xpdf and the like are all pretty large programs - and you've got to bear in mind, the formats they're designed to show are supposed to be viewed on a large computer monitor, not a tiny DAP screen.

In other words, as I've said before on the subject - don't hold your breath.

I know, that's why I said easier and I put it in quotes.  It wasn't me who requested them, and I was trying to give the OP some idea of why this was not likely to happen in a rush.  I'm also aware of all you wrote above, it's not me who needs telling.