Looking For An Honest Assessment

[terry2wa]

Here's my deal:  My son's girlfriend gave him a Zune for Christmas last year.  All of our desktops and Laptops in the household run Ubuntu, so -- as you can imagine -- the bloody Zune is almost useless.  Still, I promised the boy that I'd exhaust every possibility to make the thing work for him.  For the past five months, I've been monitoring the Zune-Linux forum daily, but there doesn't seem to be any real progress going on there at the moment.  I know that my predicament won't be solved until it is feasible to replace the Zune's firmware with Rockbox.

Here's what I honestly wish to know:  Am I just wasting my time and patience in waiting for a new port which will make Rockbox for Zune possible?  If so, I appreciate your honesty.  I realize that there's probably a whole lot more involved in the development of such a port than I can even begin to appreciate.  Hell, I don't even know if it's technically possible.

If there is cause for optimism, could someone give me a ballpark figure about how long the development process should take (and I do understand that it's all contingent upon factors which might prove unpredicatable)?

Anyway, thanks for input.  I just wish my son's girlfriend had bought him an Ipod instead...

[soap]

Rockbox on the Zune hardware is likely a long way off.
I say "likely" for the same reason I will not can not offer a ballpark figure.  The Zune is not just a variation of the Gigabeat S series (which may very well get Rockbox).  It is a platform that has been well designed to prevent the loading of non-official code/software.
Assuming the cryptographic signing used to verify "honest" Microsoft code is well implemented, it may never happen.

If you want an honest, frank, assessment of the Zune-Linux project you should search their forums for all posts by ZunePet.  He is one of, if not the only, voice of reason on those forums.

The efforts you should be paying attention to (as opposed to the joke which is Zune-Linux) are those which seek to support the Zune on Linux.  There is no reason (I am aware of) to believe that it will long remain impossible to load and manage music/videos on the Zune from a Linux desktop.

[saratoga]

I think Zunepet is the only person on Earth to seriously look into it, and he hasn't gotten very far.  I wouldn't count on it any time soon, probably not ever.

That said libmtp was working on adding Zune support, so you'll likely be able to use that eventually.

[sadffffff]

buy a copy of windows and install it on a computer/small partition/make a bartPE live disk.

[terry2wa]

I want to thank everyone who responded.  The information you gave me was most helpful and I appreciate it.