I have a Creative Zen X-Fi portable media player for some time now. I have managed to make it work with previous Ubuntu versions, but only after a lot of hard work of googling and meddling with the sytem.
I didn’t have the oportunity to test it with the latest Ubuntu since I upgraded everything to 9.04 up until a few days ago.
As with previous Ubuntu versions, 8.10 and 8.04, the Zen was not automatically recognized by any media player, or by Gnomad, which by the way is sooooo awful.
After doing some digging around in the ubuntuforums I found a way to make it happen.
The problem is that the version of libmpt (the library that makes things work) provided by the canonical repositories is an older one and does not support the player out of the box.
Running mtp-detect from the command line, connected to the player but seemed not to recognize it.
In the forums there was a reference for a PPA repository that contained more recent versions. I tried adding the repository to apt but could not get the libmtp package to upgrade (don’t know why). So, I simply downloaded the deb packages manually, libmtp8_0.3.5-0ubuntu1_i386.deb, mtp-tools_0.3.5-0ubuntu1_i386.deb, from here. Then I installed them manually with GDebi.
That did it. Running mtp-detect now, connected and recognized the player. So did Amarok, Banshee and Rhythmbox.
So, if you want to get your Createive ZEN X-Fi working under Jaunty then you simply have to manually install the 2 packages I mentioned above.
Tags: Creative, devices, jaunty jackpole, Linux, MTP, ubuntu, Zen
I tried doing what you said, but when I type “mtp-detect” the Zen X-Fi only ‘connected’ for a few seconds before the terminal starts spewing gibberish like:
“LY
dc0d: Hidden UINT16 data type enumeration: 0, 1, GET/SET
3001: Association/Directory
dc01: StorageID UINT32 data type ANY 32BIT VALUE form READ ONLY
dc02: ObjectFormat UINT16 data type ANY 16BIT VALUE form READ ONLY
dc04: ObjectSize UINT64 data type READ ONLY
dc41: PersistantUniqueObjectIdentifier UINT128 data type READ ONLY
dc44: Name STRING data type GET/SET
dc0b: ParentObject UINT32 data type ANY 32BIT VALUE form READ ONLY
dc07: ObjectFileName STRING data type REGULAR EXPRESSION FORM GET/SET
dc4f: NonConsumable UINT8 data type enumeration: 0, 1, GET/SET
dc03: ProtectionStatus UINT16 data type enumeration: 0, 1, 32771, READ ONLY
dc0d: Hidden UINT16 data type enumeration: 0, 1, GET/SET
Storage Devices:
StorageID: 0×00010001
StorageType: 0×0003 fixed RAM storage
FilesystemType: 0×0002 generic hierarchical
AccessCapability: 0×0000 read/write
MaxCapacity: 16130965504
FreeSpaceInBytes: 6607962112
FreeSpaceInObjects: 4294967295
StorageDescription: Storage Media
VolumeIdentifier: 42F900015A35C72A0002D8DEF422072A
Special directories:”
That was only a small part of the output. My Zen X-Fi doesn’t actually dock. (Fortunately my computer will still charge its battery).
That fixed it for me, great!
My steps:
I shut Amarok
installed:
libmtp8_0.3.5-0ubuntu1_i386.deb, mtp-tools_0.3.5-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
as suggested.
Started Amarok.
Had left my Zen X-Fi 32G connected, so had to remove and reconnect it.
Many thanks
You Sir are awesome. Thanks a lot! worked instantly for my Zen Vision.
Thanks, that works a lot better now